The Upside to $4 a Gallon Gas . . .

Gas prices seem to have stabilized – at last temporarily – at the New Normal of about $3.40 or so per gallon for regular unleaded.

But $4 gas did have its upsides. For instance:

* The argument for telecommuting got stronger –

There are many jobs that do not require the worker’s physical presence at a traditional office. With high-speed Internet, Skype and so on, one can effectively communicate with fellow employees, customers – and so on – as or even more effectively than in a traditional office setting. For instance, it’s easier – and much faster – to set up a teleconference than it is to get a dozen people to the same location for a conventional in-person meeting.

However, most employers have been reluctant to allow workers who could work from home to actually work from home.

Part of this is just the inertia of tradition – “people have always come to an office.” There’s also the control freak condescension of employers who suspect that workers won’t work if they aren’t stuck in a cubicle and watched all day long like sixth graders who can’t be trusted to do what they’re supposed to.

However, studies of telecommuting find that productivity actually increases when workers don’t have to waste an hour or two stuck in traffic just getting to work. Eliminating the commute can also be a huge financial incentive for both employer and employee. It amounts to “raise” (in the form of savings on gas as well as vehicle wear and tear) that goes right into the employee’s pocket – but doesn’t cost the employer a cent.

That’s a win-win for everyone.

* It’s a great excuse to buy a motorcycle –

If you have a bike – and a wife – odds are your wife doesn’t much like the bike. But when gas is $4 per gallon, you can point out to the wife how much money you’re saving by riding instead of driving. Even the biggest cruiser bike (or fastest crotch rocket) can usually deliver at least 35 mpg, average – as good or better fuel economy than almost any subcompact economy car. Smaller bikes routinely deliver 50-60 mpg or more – which outperforms any hybrid car.

Just switching from a car that gets 20 mpg on average to a bike that gets double that reduces your monthly fuel bill by half.

It’s hard to argue with that.

* $4 gas got people thinking (good thoughts) about nuclear power again –

A small group of vocal hysterics and know-nothings have succeeded in more or less shutting down the expansion of the nuclear power grid in this country. No new plants have been built in decades – even though it’s a fact that not one person has ever been killed by radioactive leakage/exposure in the entire history of US nuclear power. On the other hand, thousands have been killed (and many more maimed and crippled for life) by coal mining – which provides the bulk of U.S. electricity.

The US is not Russia – and an American nuclear power plant is not Chernobyl. Designed with the proper safeguards, nuclear power is not just clean and efficient, it is safe. Safer, in fact, than any other source of power generation we currently have access to or can expect to have for the foreseeable future.

With gas prices soaring, maybe the silent majority can finally speak up – and shout down the anti-nuclear cowheads.

Due to the stupidity of our government and its bureaucratic rigmarole – along with inferior quality diesel fuel – the US consumer has been denied 40 mpg-plus and high-performance diesel sedans from BMW and Mercedes – as well as 70 mpg small cars from VW and others that handily beat the at-the-pump performance of the best hybrid cars without costly and complex hybrid vehicle technology. That is changing – finally. The US now has low-sulfur diesel fuel – and the legal/regulatory situation (emissions control issues, mostly) has been addressed by dint of the fuel issue having been taken care of.

Chevy and Mazda have just added diesel-powered cars to their US product portfolio (Cruze and Sky-D 3 respectively) and other manufacturers are following suit.

$4 gas helped egg that along – even if inadvertently.

* Decent small cars –

It is no longer necessary to spend more than $20,000 to get a car you’re not ashamed of – and don’t dread driving. In fact, it’s not necessary to spend much more than $15k to get a car you’ll be proud of – and look forward to driving. One that has all the necessaries – air conditioning, a good audio system – and none of the liabilities (such as shoddy build quality, inadequate power/performance) that were formerly characteristic of lower-priced cars.

Models like the Fiat 500, the new Ford Focus, the Nissan Versa, Mazda2 and Dodge Dart are eons evolved from dreck like the Chevy Chevette and its kind.

And a major driver has been consumer demand for smaller cars that aren’t crappy cars.

Thank $4 per gallon fuel for putting the pressure on!

* There was less traffic out there –

This one’s a mixed bag, but:

When gas cost $4 per, if you could still afford to drive, the drive itself was less aggravating than it was when gas cost $2 (or less) per gallon – because there were suddenly far fewer cars on the road.

After gas prices doubled circa 2008, traffic decreased across the board, nationwide, on both highways and secondary roads as people throttled back on their day-tripping, carpooled – or just stayed home. There was a welcome pause in what had been a relentless annual uptick in the total number of cars on the roads as well as the annual mileage racked up by these cars.

Driving almost anywhere when gas was $2 per or less was becoming a hassle; at $4 per gallon we may drive less often – but we can actually drive again when we do. Instead of staring at the bumper of a minivan with soccer ball stickers all over it as we bump and grind along at 15-25 mph.

141 COMMENTS

Americans are complaining about gas prices going up to $4 per gallon try living in UK where gas prices are now at £1.40 per Ltr so it works out at around £1.40 X 3.75(Ltr to gall) =£5.25 X 1.50 (£ to $)= $7.87 per gallon over here we see items on the news about Americans who complain about the gas prices you have and we laugh about it now you know why we drive much smaller cars with much higher MPG plus if we drive one of the cars that has a larger engine and lower MPG we get hit with a yearly road fund licence fee which does not go to maintain the roads but is just another way for them to take money from you. If a person is in one of the higher tax classes they could be paying 40% income tax if they use the money they earn the money and pay income tax at 40% they then spend the money on gas they will have to pay 20% VAT plus a special fuel tax of £2.19 per gallon which is just under 30% so all in all it adds up to£6.64 tax out of the £10.00 you earned, the cost of fuel you pay for is £3.36 and Americans think they pay to much Tax

The tragedy is that America’s becoming indistinguishable from the socialist kleptocracies of Europe. Give it another few years – I’m sure we’ll be paying $8 for a gallon of gas (and 60 percent of our income in taxes).

Poppy Ann, Due to distances traveled and industry like agriculture and trucking, having fuel prices such as the ones in your country would destroy our economy. That will happen when TPTB decide to rent us asunder. Get ready for the shooting war at that point. The problem with the shooting war won’t be because it’s a shooting war but because people will be shooting each other instead of those who need to be offed.

Hey Eric you slacker, why no Bike articles for a while?
Apart from that, is it O.K to cut & paste (with appropriate references and links) to other sites?
If it is, I’d like to post a couple of your articles over at “BikeMe”, an Australian motorcycle forum that has a philosophy pretty much aligned with this one.( http://www.bikeme.tv/ )
Cheers,
Klav.

PS PS: We are seriously looking at changing the site name/URL due to Epautos.com being blackballed by Goo-guhl. They’ve screwed us to the point that we’re on the verge of not covering the cost of our servers. It’s that bad. Once “de-listed” by Goo-guhl, you’re effectively ruined.

Huh?
They are blackballing you?
How do they screw you?
Do you even get the courtesy of a reach around?
De-Listed, eh?
You’d think that would go against one of their founding principles “Don’t be evil”
It’s evil to not expose wrongs,no?

eric, about 3 weeks before the elections last year I noticed many sites I visit all of a sudden had to have all sorts of Goo-ghul scripts enabled to display everything. I knew they’d gone on a selling blitz at that point, probably under-cutting everyone else and wondered what the payoff would be down the road. I guess you answered my question. I guess I should send money to the makers of NoScript. I don’t allow any more scripts from them to run than necessary. I noticed a large increase in the different scripts they were using too. I was already looking for a replacement for their search engine long before DuckDuckGo came along, generally used Startpage HTTPS although it wasn’t the engine of their competitors, they didn’t set LSO’s and rampant cookies. Another reason for me to find someone besides Yahoo and ATT.

Not sure, but maybe there’s a legal challenge?
Given it’s censorship, de facto, since Goo-Ghul is in bed with teh gov’t – maybe a Joint and Several, or de facto Monopoly? (Need to talk to someone more knowledgeable than I, but if you could make it stick – punitive damages would be IMMENSELY profitable. 😀 )

goo-ghul is tool of the NWO, of course – that’s part of the plan.
That said, my favorite browser is still chrome. Firefox, Opera, Internet Exploder, Chrome – Chrome is best for my purposes. 😛

But TOR if I need to stay out of sight, at a minimum. I need more public proxy servers and hotspots if i’m going to even pretend to disappear.

Jean, 3 years ago I’d have said just cruise with your wifi searching and stop when you find one but there’s been so many people busted and charged with exceptionally bad charges just for doing that I don’t think I’d try. In every case I knew, the owner of the non-password protected signal was unaware anyone was using it so where is the crime? If you camped out there days at a time I can see how they’d get tired of you using a great deal of bandwidth but unless you did that they wouldn’t even know and dealing with it is as simple as installing a password. We get back into no fault crimes again. I used to live in a travel trailer and there were various signals around, most protected but some not. I got on one that wasn’t and determined it to be fast, asked around and went to the owners. Hello, my name is ……and I live right over there in the TT and saw you had an open wifi and wondered if you’d mind if I checked my email with it. How are you? Come on in, we’re just hanging out. No, we don’t mind, we don’t use it much. Now, how did you say you found it? Good people, getting a little education.

ACTUALLY, it’s been decided that “stealing” wireless access is a crime.
Actual reason, the person running the open hotspot is criminally and civilly liable for whatever those users download. Example would be kiddie pr0n – the PROVIDER gets in legal trouble because the data came through HIS pipes.

I am tired of this effing witch-hunt, too. Sex Offenders and Kiddie Pr0n and such – I’ll state up front, there are those who need to be terminated for the good of society – everyone here knows that.
But it’s become a massive money-maker and life-destroyer, MOSTLY for young men. Teenager receives an unsolicited sext from a girl he goes to school with – HE gets charged with having kiddie pr0n. SHE gets – NOTHING. (Should be guilty of producing kiddie pr0n.) so there’s the unequal treatment before the law, for one.
Then, there’s the whole AGE issue: They’re both TEENAGERS. As in, there’s no reason to worry about things, it’s NORMAL HUMAN BEHAVIOR (as aided by technology). It’s the new Coat Room / make-out party. But he (or both of them) are branded as SEX OFFENDERS and treated WORSE than lepers.

At this point? We don’t HAVE very many 20-50 year old men running around with teenage girls. Clover would claim it’s proof the law works; but Clover has forgotten the Satanic Ritual Abuse scam that came just prior, and the various false “recovered memories” that were and still are common… And just SEETHES at the idea that SOMEONE, SOMEWHERE, MIGHT commit a crime. (Even without a vicitim.)

*: Caveat: REAL rapes, REAL child pornography, just like murder, I have a problem with. But if I ogle a woman and she can cry rape? It’s meaningless. WRT child porn, if a child is harmed, there’s a problem. If the child intentionally is doing things – say, a 15-year-old sexting photos of her/himself? STFU. NOT kiddie pr0n. OTOH, a 60 year old man seducing a pre-pubescent child? THAT is evil.

Jean, Don’t know how long it’s been a law but we made some antennas from old DTV-Dish dishes, could get a signal 1/4 m away. Kiddie porn, what a joke. The people who think this shit up have no idea what Normal is. It’s certainly not them. I’ve noticed it’s these very people who tend to get caught in their own laws too. The person(seems like a disproportionate amount of women these days)who comes up with this crap end up hanging from their own petard. Govt. gives kiddie porn as a reason for every invasion of privacy, esp. the internet. I know one thing about kiddie porn, it evidently exists somewhere although I don’t believe it’s as widespread as they make it to be. Having never seen it and not knowing where to find it, it’s just not in the fore of my mind since I don’t seem to require it. I sure don’t go for all these prosecutions of young men(boys mostly)for interacting with their little girlfriends. I got together with some of my nephews and families a few years back since we don’t really communicate due to their mother, my sister. I noticed this hot, tall blonde in a black dress, looked to be about 25. I asked one nephew Hey, who’s the hot blonde? He fell out laughing. He said, that’s your great niece, Chris, girl from first marriage. Hey, you coulda fooled me. She was 15 going on 30. Later I looked at her really close…no giveaway to being 15. Who coulda known? I guess the guys either have to be psychic or ID potential GF’s these days. I say “these days” and nothing’s really changed except for attitude toward relationships. yep, in my day, there were hot women who turned out to be 14, absolutely stacked looking like the hottest thing on two legs but nobody was focused on trying every guy who took her out. If her daddy didn’t know why she was so popular, he needed to get some eye surgery. Of course “I” never took anyone out just for sex. You believe that don’t you? Say yes and I’ll mail you one of my brochures for a great deal on some beach front property in west Texas.

I have to admit that’s my working assumption, too – one I hope will be proved erroneous.

But, I doubt it.

I was having a conversation the other day when the subject – what to do? – came up. I expressed my opinion that there was a great degree of liberty in America once upon a time chiefly because the reach of government (and government lovers) was limited. Not because government was limited. The desire to impose control has always existed. But the physical difficulty of reigning in people living diffusely in remote places was simply much greater. People did for themselves – and not only resented being told what to do, were in a position to avoid being told what to do.

It may be that humans won’t have another such opportunity until space travel is worked out and it becomes possible to leave the earth and start over someplace else. A new earth, free of people – and thus, government.

As was suggested on the X files and a few others – there’s a REASON we aren’t going into space. LOTS of creative accounting has been suggested, to make it too costly and not cost-effective, both.

OTOH, should we defective “freedom lovers” be modified first into perfect slaves, I’d wager that there’d be a sudden exodus of Elites. (Thinking of the upcoming film Elysium as an example, though perhaps even worse than that.) They’d take their slaves with them, a la “escape from Terra” and Quantum Vibe (Esp. Quantum Vibe arcs w/ Earth interaction.) [big head press, BTW.]

I would postulate there is a connection between our DIS-connection from the divine (and each other), and the need to control the uncontrollable, as a measure of exercising control over SOMETHING.

So, because the farmer can’t control when it rains, and he’s worried about his crops, he is abusive towards his family. (Term used advisedly, meaning that he’s unecessarily sharp and curt and manipulative, as opposed to lashing out. Though over time, it will turn to lashing out, if he doesn’t check himself or get checked.)

It’s a mental degradation that used to be filled from Religion and/or philosophy. Whether Christian, Jewish, Hindu, Shintoist, Wiccan, Druid, even Muslim, or Taoist, Zen, or Confuscianist (Or the others I’ve omitted), these were ways to connect with something bigger than humanity. As long as that “supreme being” exists – even just as an Ideal, as the concept of Honor – society can remain stable and moral.

If there is no god, or “God is dead,” there is no purpose to living by ANY standards. (Moving to Big-L Liberalism, and Communism/Marxism, Nihilism, and sublime egoism.) And there’s also no plan for the universe – so you must achieve “safety” by controlling EVERYTHING within your purview. Control Freak-ism spins the Hamster-brain into overdrive – which parallels in microcosm the exact processes of the society / mob / Demos. [Side note: Giving women the vote only sped up the process – check governmnet expenditures since that time.]

So, if there’s a God (even just the concept, not the being) who has a Plan for us, we can exist in relative peace. We’ll be taken care of (in a sense), we have a place, a purpose.
OTOH, if there’s no “god” concept – there’s no plan, we’re random particles in space – and therefore, our position is tenuous, risky, unstable, and we’re always on edge – like hearing a minor chord in a movie (think Psycho) sets one’s nerves on edge, only this doesn’t stop afterwards – it just keeps going. Sets in your bones, echoes in your ears, just above audible levels. One could call it the voice of the devil, too, to complete the analogy.

It connects to the pack-mentality. Think Dog or Wolf, even a community of rats. As long as most people have a place in their “pack” (IT Geek; Cheerleaders; Goth; Emo; Druggie; Jock; Banker; Stock Broker; Father; Mother; PTA; Liberal; Conservative; Democrat; Republican; etc.) We are defined by these groups we place ourselves in; most people can’t handle the tumult of actual liberty. It requires DISCIPLINE, it requires planning – you are free to die, free to fail. That’s painful to the mediocre (the truly stupid are unaware of the pain; the exceptional resolve to fix the problem and do better.)

But the vast majority is mediocre. Always has been, always will be – just how averages work. And they do need guidance and that’s where religion and philosophy fit in – and when they are rejected and denied, well – we are living in the results.
There’s NO PLAN?!
OUTLAW BLACK TRENCHCOATS! (Columbine)
OUTLAW DRUGS! (Brings in the undesirable social elements)
YOU MUST WEAR A HELMET! (Brain-dead, living on life support, sucking up tax dollars)
– AND KNEEPADS!
– AND ELBOWPADS!!!
– AND WRIST AND HAND GUARDS!!!
– AND WEAR YOUR PROTECTIVE VEST!!! (Because little Johnny went off a ramp on his bike and is now paralyzed or dead, and NO MOTHER SHOULD HAVE TO FEEL THAT LOSS!!! Etc.)

If God has a plan (regardless of whether God exists), it’s all OK – As Joker said, it’s “Part of the plan.”
But shoot one little mayor?!!! OH, THE HORROR! (And not because the Mayor is dead, but because of the blow to ORDER… The LACK OF CONTROLS ON OTHER PEOPLE TO MAKE THEM DO WHAT WE WANT –> Believe/”FEEL” is good.)
The not-lead dog (non-alpha) doesn’t encessarily want to be the alpha – he just wants to be sure no one ELSE can be alpha. Crabs in a pot, ya know? And over time, the Monkeys and the Banana (with firehoses, experiment in psychological control, recall?) becomes true. (IE, “nobility” in olde england, where nobility was by blood and taken by force of arms.)

We could spin it around a lot longer, but I have to do some work… 😉
It’s hard to break the indoctrination. Wait until we’ve got chip-implants to “help” us make the “right” [dictated] choices.

Jean, we all know Libertarianism is a hard sell to many people, not so much for others so one thing I try to do to slip some of it in without being a pain(to them, hence, turning them off to the message)is to just offer them a neat comic I found, very entertaining and give them Quantam Vibe as well as Escape from Terra. If you got sucked into the story lines you could hardly come out as statist as before….????

Nuclear Power. You dont have to be crazy to be afraid of a nuclear power plant. Reference Japan recently. Tho I am not as opposed to them as I once was, I still dont want to live next door to one. Or down wind. Do you?
Also they require lots of water, which in some areas is becoming scarce. Would much rather spend the copius amounts of money required building and maintaining one on other energy. My current fave is wind energy.

I agree with you about telecommuting, however, some people dont like it because it is very solitary and can be lonesome. Working together in the same place can be a social adventure.

As for cars on the road, they seem as crowded as ever to me. The expressways around here are parking lots for longer and longer each day. I wonder what the actual figures are? I would be intersted.

Small Cars – even tho there are more and better small cars on the road, seems to me that theres alot of SUV’s and huge pickups too. I drive a VW Golf, not even a real small car, I am frequently in the size minority. I dont think most people really care about gas milage, at least not as much as I do.

Downshift, the wind industry took a big hit last year when Congress cut their subsidy by several billion dollars. An Ohio company shuttered up as well as a couple in Tx. and some other SW state. I also noticed some damaged units not running for long periods of time. Since there are 3 fields very close to Sweetwater, Tx. and a couple more just east and west of the other fields, they have a fairly large profile there and companies that repair and maintain these fields. There was a layoff in some of those companies and I noticed not many vehicles parked at a facility between Roby and Snyder Tx the last time I passed that way. I think they did at some of the subsidy back but not a great deal. You can probably access more information that you could want by searching for wind farms in west Tx since there are several just out here, in fact the largest ones in existence. I guess I’d take the money if I had land somewhere they wanted to install them if I didn’t live close by or on the same land. They do pay really well but they’re just so obnoxious and ugly I hate to even look at them. I knew a guy who retire a decade or so ago and bought some land S of Sweetwater, out where it’s peaceful and there’s good hunting but he built too close to a neighbor and now has one right on top of him. That would be hard to take. It’s not like they’re silent. I’m guessing that wind mill you drive by will be idle for some time. All the big oil companies and energy users such as GE are vested in the industry for the tax benefits and subsidy but I’m sure XOM makes well more money from selling oil than investment in alternative energy.

Mike, my point was, you’re a big fan of windpower and it seems it’s not viable without goberment subsidies. If so, it ain’t worth a hill of beans.

Ya might try hydro power? Idk.

On a small scale, windpower might work?
I just haven’t read anything that supports such a notion, small or large scale.

My other point (I’m surprised you missed it) was that the broken nuke plant in Japan was due to gooberment mismanagement, and so perhaps the free market – if it had an actual free hand – would have prevented such from happening and stopped any outflows far sooner than dear gooberment.

I’ve yet to read of anything that says nuke plants wouldn’t operate without gooberment subsidies, do you have anything saying that?

Gooberment subsidies mess up so very many things.

In the end, I’d go with: Let the free market decide what works and what does not. We haven’t tried that yet.

I just want to point out that every U.S. Aircraft Carrier and Submarine has mobile nuclear power plants and have had for decades. Now I could be wrong and the military is notorious for cover ups but I have yet, to my knowledge, to hear of any serious nuke accident aboard one of those vessels. Now don’t get me wrong, I’m an philosophical anarchist and capitalist that does not support stealing from people (the thugberment call it taxation) or borrowing based on the future ability of goonberment to steal from people to build such weapons but it appears that nuclear is the way to go based on this track record.

IIRC, the only accident involving a nuclear-powered vessel was the loss of Thresher – which imploded and sank. But (again, IIRC) the accident didn’t involve the nuclear powerplant, but was due to substandard construction that caused the sub to lose structural integrity at depth.

Problem with diesels in the US is they make you pee into a tank or they crap out.
Nuclear power is not only not safe it is extremely dangerous, as evidenced by the Fukashima disaster. People have died in the US from nuclear power, it was just not reported in the media. If we use a lot of nuclear power the wastes will poison the entire earth, The storage procedures have thousands of years to go wrong. I cannot believe anybody would want to have nuclear power, because if humans build something, it will eventually go wrong.

Seems to me the problems at Nuclear power plants is more to do with government failure than anything else.
I recall reading that one volcano spews out more radioactive material than all of mankind has produced to date. So far the volcanoes haven’t ended the world, so I doubt nuclear waste will.

Also, I’ve read there are far more deaths from coal plants so there goes the extremely dangerous reasoning for not having nuclear power.

Downshift, the MSM won’t even go near the truth of coal fired emissions nor the way electricity is delivered which causes way more deaths than nuclear ever has and probably ever will. Having said that though, isn’t there some other 3rd world country we could ship all that waste to besides west Texas where there aren’t enough people to oppose it to keep them from doing it. It’s not like the people don’t realize the danger here in regards to our aquifers, they just don’t have enough clout to stop the moneyed crowd….in the other states, including the non-sovereign yankee state of Austin.

I’d bet there are enough people out there to make shipping and handling the waste a VERY costly proposition…
A few dead workers, suddenly everything stops.

The only way to get through the massive cro-magnon skull of a bureaucrat/government worker is with a large impulse (energy) at a weak spot.
Like a .50 Barret through an eyeball… It makes that “cooling unit” in their head less efficient, and they eventually shut down.
😉

And again, to restate the obvious: If they’re forcibly dumping waste in your territory, you HAVE BEEN AGGRESSED AGAINST. And if you don’t deal with the collaborators – no matter HOW GOOD your intentions – the enemy wins, because you’re not doing what’s needed. You’re not engaging the enemy, not fighting.

jean, I won’t argue the point. On a purely speculative level, reckon how many little guys with their little weapons you’d need to thwart the Nat. Guard, Tx. Militia, US Armed Forces, FBI, CIA, Tx. Rangers, DPS SWAT teams, Bloomie’s Army(no need to call), etc., etc.? The best you could hope for would be a turf war and that looks less likely every day with the huge nanny state growing exponentially. Get the Chinese and Russians on your side and off the very people you seek to protect in just a couple battles. We already lost the PR battle.

However, most employers have been reluctant to allow workers who could work from home to actually work from home.

Part of this is just the inertia of tradition – “people have always come to an office.” There’s also the control freak condescension of employers who suspect that workers won’t work if they aren’t stuck in a cubicle and watched all day long like sixth graders who can’t be trusted to do what they’re supposed to.

I’ve been almost exclusively telecommuting for the last seven years, without any real impact at all on my ability to keep either my bosses or my clients happy.

The objection to it is exactly as you state: most bosses are clueless control freaks and part of the reason they want a physical presence in the office is so that they can dump their work and responsibilities (which they’re usually incapable of handling) onto you, the lowly worker bee. Another reason is jealousy. Most bosses/middle managers have to be in the office every day, usually for no other reason than that the executive-level oxygen thieves demand it. Ergo, since they can’t telecommute and have to be miserable, they want to make sure that everyone else has to share the misery.

To any young (high school or college age) readers out there, a word to the wise: forget about working in corporate Amerika. Very little, if anything, of value is produced in today’s corporate environment anymore, it’s run by useless, talentless imbeciles (see Scott Adams’s Dilbert Principle), it’s more political than the inside the Washington Beltway, it’s much more stress and aggravation than it’s worth, it takes years off of your life, and it’s utterly dehumanizing.

Learn a useful trade instead and go to work for yourself – even if it means “going underground.”

“The objection to it is exactly as you state: most bosses are clueless control freaks and part of the reason they want a physical presence in the office is so that they can dump their work and responsibilities (which they’re usually incapable of handling) onto you, the lowly worker bee. Another reason is jealousy. Most bosses/middle managers have to be in the office every day, usually for no other reason than that the executive-level oxygen thieves demand it. Ergo, since they can’t telecommute and have to be miserable, they want to make sure that everyone else has to share the misery.”

First hand experience here. Six years of design/engineering as an employee from my home office, visited the main office less than five times in that period. Stellar reviews and top of my field according to those I have worked with.

New owners buy the company, demand I work from the office. I refuse. I get termination notice.

This was not a performance issue or logistics problem, everyone thought the setup worked very well. Just some suit (head office, not local) decided that ‘telecommuting was not acceptable to the company’, and told my boss I had to comply or be fired. Policy not performance was the deciding factor. Company will now fail as anyone who knew anything when the (local office) company was purchased has been purged to the point that there is not one person in the office with more than two years relevant experience in what we do.

I would have thought that someone in the company would have stopped to think, “in this economy why would an employee be willing to walk away from a job?”. Three offers last week alone, two from the direct competition. Success is the best revenge.

Speaking of nuclear energy, why not Thorium reactors? China is developing and ready to deploy and they were originally designed in the US but GE bought the patents to shut it down – most likely at the behest of Uncle Sambo. Reason being they can’t be used to produce all that weapons material.

Have you also noticed how Gas is the only commodity that isn’t priced separately from its local sales tax component? Why? because it’s taxed at a huge multiple of local sales tax.

“even though it’s a fact that not one person has ever been killed by radioactive leakage/exposure in the entire history of US nuclear power.”

I get your point. Nuclear power is safer than producing power from coal for the most part. There is a seldom know meltdown that happened in the Idaho desert at INEL in 1961. The plant was called SL1 and was operated by the military. It was a mobile prototype reactor. While doing maintenance one of the crew pulled the main control rod out too far causing the reactor to go super critical and the plant to melt down. All three crew members died. The plant was partially cleaned up and the rest left at the sight and buried. I used to drive by it every day for work. There is some crazy stuff like this out in INEL land. LOL.

goldhoarder – I’m a veteran of the nuclear industry and agree with Eric’s assessment. I now work in the fossil side of power production and even though it’s one of the “cleaner” plants, it’s still dirty compared to nuclear. There is a tremendous amount of nuclear oversight even at the plant level, as in “resident” (i.e. offices on-site) NRC inspectors. Even a minor regulatory / safety infractions will get the plant shut down until they’re resolved. The fed-gov has a far worse record with respect to radiological contamination / releases than the commercial industry does. Just a few years ago (I haven’t checked in a while) if you killed a deer on the Oak Rridge National Lab grounds, you had to carry the carcass in for a whole body count, because the gov had contaminated the woods around there. Johnston Atoll was another classic example of gov gone wild. How about Hanford, Rocky Flats and on and on and on. Don’t like nuclear? How about Plum Island? Could one of their nasty little experiments have gotten loose and shown up in Lyme, Connecticut? Naw, our fearless leaders and the scientist toadies would never let that happen…

Most of the paranoia about nuclear energy is media / eugenicist tripe. More inexpensive energy equals more humans. Humans to the elite (excepting themselves of course) are a cancer plaguing the planet. Do away with inexpensive energy, clean water and helpful chemicals such as DDT and they figure (accurately) that more humans will die off. The DDT ban, based on about as much fact as Rachel Carson’s book, Silent Spring was, has done a dandy job of killing millions of brown, black and yellow children through the hideous infacticidal bio-warfare agent known as malaria. The PTB won’t be happy until the 500 million remaining serfs and slaves are reading by candlelight and plowing with mules again. They, of course, still hope to remain in luxury and opulence as the rest of us live, work and ultimately die on their terms. Their terms don’t include seeing the price of gasoline, diesel fuel, mass transit, electricity or natural gas ever going down nor the value of what passes for our “money” ever going up. I hate to be a naysayer, but I don’t foresee the return of nuclear power (at least in an affordable form) in our lifetime for the very reason that it could help empower us “small people.” If the PTB have anything to do with it, that will never happen.

Nuclear power plants were mainly a boondoggle for the politically connected back in the 1950s and 60s. They also were built to ensure a constant supply of nuclear fissile material for building bombs during the arms race of the cold war. The cost of a new start up is astronomically prohibitive. Young people do not study nuclear engineering anymore except for a few in the US Navy. The industry is dying and I’m OK with that. For the amount of work that one barrel of light sweet crude oil can do, it’s probably still a bargain at $200/gallon (although I’ll be driving something else at that point and not my thirsty V8s). Thorium reactors might be a plausible alternative some time in the future, but realistically any working reactors are probably at least a generation away. I think most of us understand that cheap energy has been a wonderful benefit for humanity and it’s a pity that market actors aren’t able to react in rational ways to drive prices down as they surely would outside of constant market manipulation by the “rulers”.

I read a lot of your posts through the LewRockwell site – I work in the Nuclear Power industry – natrual gas prices are a huge part of our competition (not only thing) right now. Appreciate your safety statistics….so many people forget that over 20,000 people died in Japan, none from radiation at Fukushima. Although I’m not dismissing that more modern core designs, with natural circulation (like the Westinghouse AP-1000) might have kept the core cool long enough before additional water was added, thus eliminating a core melt. The explosions were from Hydrogen generation…..keeping in mind that hydrogen is highly explosive…not sure about the Hydrogen cars that were so highly spoke about a decade ago.

I’m a big car guy, but purchased a Chevy Cruze ECO this year with 6 speed manual. I do the majority of my driving in it – a lot for work. I’ve averaged over 40MPG for every tank, sometimes as high as 46 MPG for a tank. Its a much more solid car than the old Ford Escort, Chevy cavilier days. Although – I believe it weighs over 3000 pounds! These cars just keep getting heavier and heavier!

How fast do you drive that ECO on the freeway? I like the car myself. It gets almost as good mileage as the Diesel model but costs thousands less. Cars today weigh too much due to government regulations. I think that the average car is nearly 1000 lbs heavier than they were in 1985.

It is really hard to find a manual transmission car these days. Great theft deterrent.

PS: I’m working up my review of the ’14 Focus ST. It’s similar to the MazdaSpeed3 in terms of performance and layout, comes only with a six-speed manual… but its gas mileage is a lot (5 MPG) better… ought to have it up by tomorrow.

People must realize that the price of gas hasn’t gone up but, due to overprinting, the value of the dollar has dropped. When you have more “dollars” chasing the same amount of products those same product’s prices adjust upwards. Gas prices,adjusted for inflation,are almost the same as they were in 1971 when the U.S.Government went off the last vestiges of the gold standard. It takes more “dollars” to buy the same amount of gas simply because the “dollar” buys less. This is also true with food,clothing and many other consumer goods including the price of automobiles. There are exceptions,but in the overall economy,this is the norm. Its basic economics.

Yes, the thugs with goonberment love to inflate the money supply because they get to use the newly created toilet paper (FRNs) at the current value of the promissory (debt) note in circulation. Everyone else beyond the first use winds up being poorer due to the strain of the hidden theft aka taxation. In my opinion this is the most evil of ways to enslave people the thugs use.

The pyramids are where the lizard men from space land and launch. Their spacecraft park on the pyramids and later take off from there powered by magic unicorn farts they steal from the glorious rainbow utopia, the people’s republik of Amerikwa, the best damn third world laughingstock joke banana republic money can buy.

Any less political terrorism in Nagasaki and Hiroshima? Different methods, better results over time. Look how much worse the degree of destruction is in Detroit. Our govt rebuilt N and H. It won’t happen for Detroit.

Yes…N and H suffered from Rapid-Onset Political Terrorism(ROPT) – “Bombs” and Dirtroit suffered slowly over 50 years of terror – “Laws”. N and H are thriving cities 70 years after their “Nuclear Accidents” and I would rather live there than Dirtroit.

People! Nuclear power is totally safe now with the gen 3 and 4 designs. They throttle and auto regulate and shutdown under heat. The reactor in Japan was friggin 60 year old shoot-from-the-hip designs. The first ever designs. Back during slide rules. It is like crash testing a model T at 80 mpg against a new Mercedes S-Class. It is near physically impossible for the new designs to break. It takes days to shutdown the reactors of 60 years ago and minutes for the new ones.

That shut down time is misleading. Although fission can be stopped fairly quickly, heat generation can’t (see my earlier comment), and also it is for many purposes more important to consider the time between shut down and full restart – which can take considerably longer.

Thanks Eric, I enjoyed the article. One word regarding nuclear power safety. “Fukushima”. All it takes is 1 bad accident to cause big problems. Why don’t we as a society peruse alternative forms of energy more aggressively? And no I don’t mean wind, solar or hydro. Yet undiscovered forms and others like cold fusion and possibly geo thermal? I loathe to say this but if the government is gonna throw money away (which they are swfully good at), why don’t they do a Manhattan Project like endeavor to make alternative energy practical and lucrative.

Downshift, I haven’t heard anything about small, mobile nuclear power plants. “Small” sounds less risky than “big.” “Mobile” however, introduces a whole new set of complications.

Eric, They certainly can do a better job of minimizing risk. But even the very best safeguards can’t revoke Murphy’s law….and “stuff happens.” And if/when that stuff does happen, the consequences can be dire indeed.

Call me a chicken little if you wish. But I’m opposed to more nuclear power plants.

More Upsides To $4.00 per gallon…..
1 It’s a great excuse to buy a bicycle. (And those eBikes are pretty interesting too.)
2 That big ass 4×4 truck you always wanted just got a lot cheaper on the used car market.
3 It is still well below $6.00 per gallon, which is about where it will choke our economy into a Real Depression.
4 Amazon.

Nuclear energy? I used to be a big advocate before Fukushima. In Cali, they finally gave up and shut down San Onofre, because they just couldn’t get those cooling pipes to stop leaking. I now think that the risk/reward ratio is unacceptable.

Hey MikePizzo, what do you think of the idea of small mobile nuke plants?
I’ve read about some. They seem to make sense.
Either way, I’m not worried about them, a single volcano has way more radioactive material spewing from them and they haven’t destroyed the earth yet.
Also, have you read about the guy who lived through being at ground zero in Japan when they dropped The abomb?
Listening to MSM you’d think life couldn’t go on after an abomb, yet, it did.

I, too, would be leery about erecting a nuclear facility in an earthquake (and tsunami) prone area. But absent that? It would not bother me much. The risk – assuming good construction/proper safeguards (apparently also problems with the Fukushima facility) is low. Preferable to coal-oil fired utilities, at any rate!

Remember, Fukushima, Chernobyl, 3-Mile Island, and any other nuclear plant that has had problems was built by the gunverment. And they have given the NGOs involved pretty much blanked immunity from liability. Absent those, it’s a different ball game.

In real terms, even with silver’s decline recently, $4 gasoline isn’t that expensive.
We are at roughly thirty cents a gallon in 90% silver coin right now. And the good old days are usually referred to as 25 or 35 cents a gallon. We’re right in the middle of that.

The problem is we are getting poorer. Gasoline seems relatively stable in terms of other things pulled out of the ground.

Bill, I read earlier this week a large Norwegian steel company will be coming to Texas very quickly. The main reason is our natural gas is a quarter the price of Norway’s. The plant will be located near Bryan and will be a first of its kind using natural gas only. On another note, I still don’t understand, except the oil companies don’t like competition for their refined products such as gasoline and diesel, why we don’t have natural gas fleets in virtually every vehicle. I did recently see that at least GM is producing their pickups and trucks with the nat gas option. It’s a step in the right direction. You can go to a GM website and go to the truck division and find out all the vehicles that are affected by this conversion or should I say, this alternative. I would like to add, I’ve been using propane my whole life, started fueling it by myself along about 1960 and I have no problem with compressed gases. I have a 1968 John Deere 4020 with so many hours I quit buying new hour meters and the engine that runs on propane is still just clean as a whistle inside and has never been overhauled. As far as propane engines go, they are the equivalent of the Energizer Bunny, just keep going and going and going. No reason why nat gas would be any different.

Natural gas just doesn’t fly with the clovers.
The safety gizmos needed. Their irrational fear. Their laws about inspecting pressure vessels and refueling stations. (natural gas can be done at home) Their refusal to maintain anything properly. Then there’s the problem of taxing it. Oh and their inability to maintain their machines properly and desire for government inspections.. So long as these attitudes prevail I think natural gas is at dead end for vehicles. And that’s all without the political problems from big oil.

Thus natural gas will probably remain a vehicle fuel for only those people who don’t need everything handed to them. People willing to go to the few fueling locations or install a home refueling gizmo.

Sorry to keep replying, but watching the energy sector has become a hobby of mine…

“There are more pure EVs coming online, though…”

That’s the problem, isn’t it? We’re replacing coal baseload with natural gas baseload (and a little wind for the TV cameras). If we’re lucky, we’ll replace what we remove and be net 0. Of course some people love this idea because they can sell us a whole new round of energy efficiency and devices that they can shut off our heat and AC when they determine it’s not necessary. What happens to electric cars and light rail systems in that grid? Better shut off a few more heaters, it’s rush hour after all. It’s said that the New York subway system runs on nuclear power because the Indian Point generating station produces about as much electricity as the subway uses. And it’s a given that the French TGV trains wouldn’t be possible without all that nuclear capacity installed in the 1970s and 80s.

It makes me wonder what we’ll miss out on because we won’t be able to power it. Out here in the west there’s a saying: “Whiskey’s for drinking, water’s for fighting.” What if California could desalinate seawater instead of pulling water from most of the western US? What would that do to the Colorado river? To the neighboring states? What would change in northern Africa if the people had all the fresh water they could ever need? What if Iran really did want a nuclear power plant because they didn’t want to burn their only export for electricity?

Eric G, you’re dreaming now…..and it’s a good dream and one I’d invest in a heartbeat, desalination that is and nuclear energy for everyone who wanted it. Of course the US is way involved in exploiting Africa right now, mostly for oil and minerals, i.e., precious metals and that will negate an efficient energy source for as long as possible. I fear Africa will be exploited by the most powerful entity for centuries since the people there just can’t seem to come up to speed. Of course I’d be the first to admit they won’t get any help in coming up to speed since it’s huge profits for their exploiters if they don’t, the same old song and dance. I would dearly love to see Ca. supply their own water and see if things could possibly return to some semblance of normalcy in the west. Of course water not taken from those other states will be auctioned off to the highest bidder for some other purpose so the people of the states it’s taken from will probably never profit in any way from it. I had a college professor tell me in 1968 that potable water would be the most precious and rare treasure on earth in my lifetime and his prediction has come true for the most part. I never doubted him being a west Texas boy and living through the drought of 1950-1958. Now we’re in another drought that looks as if it will last at least 3 times that long and possibly much longer. I won’t be surprised to see this country never have a decent rainfall again during my lifetime and that’s a likely prediction from many knowledgeable forcasters. We never had a great deal of water but the last 20 years have been much worse. Now we see a new “boom” in the oil industry that relies on heavy water usage and I don’t see it going anywhere fast since there basically is no water to be had here. Start at Ft. Worth and go west and the lakes are anything from really low to non-existent. At first it sucked the big one since I’m a died in the wool fisherman but it’s much worse than that now. We just wish the water table would get some recharge and that covers 3 major aquifers so we won’t hold our collective breaths.

Eric, I disagree with you on nuclear power to an extent. Our plants are deteriorated wrecks waiting to happen and are far past their expected life span. Yes, no one has been directly killed by them, but cancer over time (I know there are many other sources though) tends to be much higher near them and near uranium mining areas (another mining industry where people die). I am all for nuclear technology, as there are many new safe designs that don’t melt down into a radioactive mess- it’s just that none exist outside labs and universities because of special interests -and government- keeping them there. The plant designs as we know them now need to go, they are 1950s era technology- and fukushima is proof of this. Plus, why on earth do they need diesel generators for the coolant pumps if the grid goes down? They should be able to power themselves…they are power plants after all

Actually, most of todays plants in the US anyway were designed for a 40 year lifespan, but through upgrades and overbuilding to begin with they are not in any way “dilapidated wrecks.” Also, they are some of the most inspected and maintained machines ever built, working flawlessly over decades. When there is an incident, it is reported and repaired (and cleaned up if necessary), and usually the newspapers will print stories with catchy headlines with numbers that look large but in reality are barely above background.

I’m not saying that there aren’t potential problems with the aging nuclear plants in the US (look at the mess in San Onofre), but they aren’t all going to blow up tomorrow, either.

I don’t have any skin in the game, other than being a consumer of energy. For 15 years I lived about 1 mile from a nuclear reactor used for training nuclear engineers, and I lived in Pennsylvania during the TMI disaster (the core traveled through my town on the way to Idaho). But I am a nuclear fan boy, knowing that you can’t just walk away from something with so much potential just because it’s scary. They used to be afraid of gasoline too.

http://atomicinsights.com/about/ is a fairly good pro-nuclear site with a lot of commentary from people who really work in the industry and do a very good job of showing the reality of most of the blown-out-of-proportion news coverage of the nuclear industry.

Coal fired plants emit much more radiation than nuclear plants. Any chemist will tell you that. That’s why coal miners also die from cancer.
As for cancer, I could easily set up a study where people who visit ericpeters.com have higher rates of cancer than ballerinas. Just depends on who finances my study.

Funny thing about radiation (see earlier comment about Chernobyl, etc.) The Gunverment, in its Zero Tolerance wisdom, has decided that if a lot of something is bad, then we should do away with it all. There is evidence that low levels of radiation, such as a typical “Radon in your cellar problem” are actually beneficial.

Running a nuclear reactor’s cooling systems solely off the power it generates itself is dangerous, because it lacks redundancy. If there were a failure in the generating subsystems, the reactor would still need to be cooled for a while even if the fission reactions were stopped straight away (or dumped into a safe holder, which makes restarting hard), because a lot of heat gets generated by the radioactivity of the breakdown products.

I hope that gas stays where it is or goes higher. Oil, too. Being in the oil industry, I am likely to be on the dole again if that takes place. The only reason the US economy is not collapsing right now is that fuel is expensive and oil companies are going after it. At $50, the party stops. All that gas and no one to buy it.

That said, the highways are still way more jammed than they were in the 1970s when I was growing up and even in the 1980’s when I was a young adult. I miss the days when you could get on an interstate highway and actually wind it up to 100 mph and stay there for a few miles. Today, even with the small downtick in traffic, you can’t do that. There are too many poorly behaved drivers taking up too much space. The Interstate system was built in the 50s and 60s (construction basically halted after 1973) as two lanes each way. The vast majority of rural highways remain at that level with 5 times the traffic as was driving in 1973. We have a long ways to go.

Come visit Wyoming, Swamprat. The highways here are wide open and very lightly traveled in most places. I drove 150 miles last year from Casper to my home on a state highway, and I think I only saw four or five other cars until I got to town. “Rush hour” traffic in town is two vehicles stopped at the only light.

The only downside is that it’s a long drive between almost everything, so $4. a gallon gas is no friend. We depend on the trucks to bring in food and everything else we can’t produce (almost everything), and the higher the price of gas, the more expensive everything is.

MamaLiberty, I feel your economic pain living in west Texas. Back in the late 80’s the railroad in this part of the world decided to remove all the sidings in countless towns bordering I-20 and maybe other place too. I never quite understood it since they appeared to be in good shape but it happened and I know it did because I removed them in Sweetwater and Colorado City. My main regret is the 115-116° temps we had at the time I was removing them. They can no longer even access the freight docks which seem stupid. Every time diesel goes up, and consequently down for a while anyway, we have a hike in prices of everything including the most basic staples. While the Texas economy “booms” to some extent, it affects most people in a negative way. Our interstates have been severely overloaded in the mid to eastern part of the state seems like forever and the hiways in the west part of the state get mighty crowded at times but not to the point of being a big hassle or reducing the flow rate, just make them seem crowded which they are at times. When fuel prices nearly doubled in ’08, I did notice a marked reduction of traffic not only on interstates but on all highways. I’d just as soon have a bit more traffic and lower prices. I’m one of the huge majority the “boom” doesn’t help. We also have long distances to travel, 130 Miles rountrip to a significant grocery store of big box store. Travel to a specialist doctor often involves a 600 mile trip although that’s not as predominant now as in the past. I have thought of moving to Wyoming since Tx. has become such a huge nanny state but the cold there puts me off. At my late stage in life, I don’t want to have to adapt to a differing environment unless it’s an easier path. My hat’s off the Wyoming people though since our heritage is a great deal the same. Having said that though, I’m damned sick of the last 3 years of extreme high temps. There’s only so many clothes you can remove and I’m known by my friends as someone who doesn’t hesitate to remove virtually all of them to gain relief. It keeps me on the farm. I do know how to layer so it’s always in the back of my mind I COULD adapt if I had to. Stay safe and enjoy the open road.

I live in an area with very mild winters. The N/E corner is far away from Denver and other cesspools of corruption, but we’re only 80 miles from two decent sized cities (by Wyoming standards, anyway!). They both have a WalMart, and the larger one has a “Sam’s Club.”

I moved here from So. Calif. when I retired, and was very worried about the cold, but I adjusted almost immediately and now actually look forward to the first snow. The summers are warm, but very seldom get above 90 degrees, and the humidity is about 40% average. It gets dry here sometimes, but nothing like So. Calif., nor your part of Texas. We’ve had a big rainstorm the last two mornings, just for example.

Send me an email if you’d like to talk about it more. Don’t want to hijack Eric here completely. 🙂

There’s a trick I have found useful in Australian summers: while I’m not moving, say when I’m on my home computer, I sometimes put my bare feet in a bucket of cool(ish) water. I sometimes do that with hot water, say if I’ve just come in from the cold in winter, but that’s not as helpful because afterwards you get damp skin exposed to winter air, which doesn’t help the way it does in summer.

P.M. I have used the old cold shower trick all my life to get that initial relief from the heat. Walk into the house with a body temp well above 98.6° and every stitch you have on is soaked with sweat, you either go back out into the wind, stand in front of a big fan or just strip and shower, my favorite when I’ve decided to give it up. A couple weeks ago our a/c went on the blink and we were having 105° days, brutal inside and out. We were w/o for 4 days. I got one of those medical ice packs out of the freezer and wrapped around my head for a while and then put it on my chest, a great relief. I’d quit pouring sweat and feel much better. We got the parts and I’m out there in the heat trying to install them by feel since my glasses had so much sweat on the lenses I couldn’t see. Still, I got it done in record time for me, came in and clutched it and heard that sweet sound of the outside unit come on. I’m not even a Christian but I think I may have said Thank you sweet Jesus. What a relief. When we moved here 30 years ago and were now taking showers with well water, no more of ALL COLD water on a hot body unless you wanted to literally have a stroke. Come in from fighting the cold all day and the hot shower is a life saver. Our hottest day here was two days in a row at 118° and our coldest has been -17°. Northerners think Tx. doesn’t get cold and southerners think it doesn’t get that hot. Say what?

‘Part of this is just the inertia of tradition – “people have always come to an office.” There’s also the control freak condescension of employers who suspect that workers won’t work if they aren’t stuck in a cubicle and watched all day long like sixth graders who can’t be trusted to do what they’re supposed to.’

I believe Eric, liberranter, Methyl, and a whole lot of other independent businessmen on this message board understand the real reason why coming to the office is so important. My guess is it is because once a person starts to break free of the elementary classroom mentality, the next step is towards total independence and self actualization. If you don’t need the big brick building, the ignorant and politicized bosses, the ass kiss and unproductive whores and all their expensive capital equipment to make money, why have a job is the question that naturally follows. If a person loses respect for the need for big brick buildings to pen the productive in with the piranhas and sharks then the next step is only obvious. Most of us are doing what we want out of our own homes/garage/land, building second to none industry/manufacturing, newsrooms, garages, consulting, and farming/ranching. While the economy looks bleak for people who need a “job”, the future is red hot for people like ourselves. The big corporation model is dying and its flesh is decomposing and its a feeding frenzy for the productive and baused, its passed its peak oil for the dying corpse of dinosaurs and the mice are feeding.

On the other note about nuclear power, I’m still not biting after Fukushima and 3 very close disasters in the U.S. Yeah the new technology supposedly is very good. There is probably a big reason why I hate nuclear power though, and that is because it has to be big corporations, and the consequences are 1000’s of years in damage to property. Again being an individualist I’d like to see power generation end up back in the hands of the small businessman, not some gilagloth government-industry institution.

Though what I don’t understand is why the hell they don’t build these nuclear reactors in old mine shafts that have no aquifiers near them. Seems to me that one of these goes red hot and closing the tube would be pretty effective containment. And who likes looking a nuclear tomb above ground anyway, they are fugly. Further why the hell do big corporations and government build them on fault lines, in big cities and around farmland?

Besides that nuclear power isn’t needed. Power generation isn’t really in short supply despite all the propaganda otherwise. We’ve just bought into a lie that we need big reactors and generators to supply our needs. The tare of the world do need big reactors and that is because they are f’in stupid. Anyone with a bit of curiousity and resource can easily break out of all need for the oil and power line electricity and have an energy surplus. The universe is awash in massive and usable power at the individual scale.

Overall there is nothing stopping the average guy from going nuclear either. The technology and knowledge to make individual nuclear power is getting easier by the day, barriers lower. If I could stuff the Genie back in the Pandora’s box (except for myself and you on here of course) I would, but that isn’t going to happen with shared public knowledge now is it? Would nuclear power be better if every small business/person could do it?

Probably, but I’m going to ask you the productive (creators) a very good question. If you have an idea and some of you have a very good idea how to solve big problems in this world like say energy, why share it with them? If you can’t say become a millionare because you’ll know you’d get f’ed over a 1000 ways just sharing the secret, why not simply keep it a secret with the secret brotherhood of those God informed by himself? To what avail does it do you to teach everyone to how to make an airplane so that you can’t afford to freely fly your own bird? Enjoy knowing what other don’t and employ it for yourselves if you personally can’t make a big profit off it, because you know if it can be ripped off by a centralized big company or government it isn’t good for humanity as a whole anyway.

If one person finds your deepest ninja intellectual secrets out then be assured it will be stolen by the worst and credited to them and not you. Be assured it will be regulated, and you’ll get nothing but theives ostracisizing you as well. This is the real world and you are the real people of God and intellect. Keep your ninja powerful knowledge and secrets to yourselves, only release it as public information and hence the useless tare if you feel charitable and God insights you to anyway. That is my advise to God’s people, is to enjoy what you work hard for in understanding and employ it for your own well being first an foremost. Centralized ideas that are easily taken away by centralized capiltal won’t ever be yours once released to the unthinking and/or evil masses. Forget everyone else, if God wanted them to have it he would’ve planted it their head just like he did yours.

Yes the world is awash in power and ways to create locomotion from it though. $4.00 a gallon gasoline will be good for the silent operators.

Hot Rod, I’m going to try to find a comprehensive article done by and industry expert(s) I read a couple years ago. Basically it said that due to cost over-runs, the huge amount of energy, equipment, maintenance and other auxillary costs, nuclear power had never been a net producer. I don’t find that hard to believe at all. We pay for it, and pay for clean up costs, pay for all sorts of things to make it work better and pay for countless costs associated with just keeping it running and let’s not forget one of the most costly parts, bureaucratic govt. bs. I’ll try to find that source and get back with you. It will certainly be tomorrow. I’m tired as hell. Oh, I guess I’m never supposed to mention that.

Zero point energy is BS (I’m going out on a limb and assuming that’s what you’re talking about). Yes the universe is “awash” in energy, but the darn place is big. Very very big. That energy is spread out so thin that it’s just above absolute zero in most of the universe. In order to capture said energy you’ll expend far more than you get back unless you have millions of years (and a little gravity) to do it.

Of course that’s also why the Sun is both a great source of energy and a terrible one at the same time. Sure, there’s lots of solar radiation hitting the Earth every day. Much of it is in the form of heat (which is why solar hot water is incredibly cheap and efficient and should be in every home… and why you’ll never see real subsidies for installing it), and a good chunk is in the form of light, which is very diffuse and hard to capture, which is why solar panels sound great but don’t work worth a damn in real world situations unless you have a lot of them (and a lot of the Earth’s surface to devote to them), which is why rich people like them so much… yet another way to screw the poor through net power metering.

Meanwhile the energy density of coal, oil and natural gas is much higher than anything non-nuclear out there. So much so that we can travel hundreds of miles, heat our homes to 4 times the outdoor temperature on the coldest winter days or do work that would have taken several domestic servants all day in a few minutes.

But then compare all of them to the nuclear force. E=mc^2 actually means something. Do the calculation: 1 gram of mass times C (speed of light) squared = 6.6289e+13 foot-pounds. The Lamborghini Diablo torque spec is said to be about 450 foot-pounds. That’s 0.0000000000450e+13 expressed in the same notation as the gram of mass calculation above.

Now, our crude early nuclear reactors (remember they’ve only been around for about 50 years, about as long as the beginning of the internal combustion engine to the invention of the 4 stroke Otto engine) are very inefficient. It makes sense that newer generation reactors would evolve in design to make better use of the fuel and produce fewer waste products, as well as become safer. But because there are dangers in any technology there’s a historical backlash against it. Add to it the exponential increase in energy density and what it means to the status quo and you’ll quickly understand why those who have it to lose will do anything to keep nuclear off the table. Just watch TV and count the number of ads seen for internal combustion engines, and their support and fueling. Don’t think for one second the people cashing the checks don’t realize where they come from. Then ask yourself why every wind farm in the country also has a gas turbine plant being built nearby (for “backup” of course), but no one calls out the energy companies on it? But someone wants to build a nuclear plant, with no emissions, gets refueled every 18 months or so (gas plants have very little storage on site and depend on constant pipeline delivery… which means electricity producers might not be able to buy gas when they need it (http://www.forbes.com/sites/peterdetwiler/2013/03/21/electricity-and-gas-markets-are-out-of-synch-sooner-or-later-this-will-hurt-us/), and only need a small sized fuel container, about the size of one rail car, instead of the 2-4 1 mile long coal trains that are need to operate a coal plant every day of the year. I spent several years living next to a major rail line and after seeing these trains running from Craig to Pueblo every day I became a nuclear convert.

We may be OK using coal and gas for electricity generation now, but I want a world where we can easily desalinate seawater instead of dividing up water rights and having to sweat out crop failures because of droughts. I want to be able to break the backs of the status quo who depend on granting us “just enough” to get by (if you can afford to pay up), while insuring the disruptive technology continues to be mired in over-regulation and fear.

My generation screwed nuclear up, but that’s mostly due to the fear of the unknown fed to us from the previous generation, who still can’t seem to differentiate bombs and power plants. We have fuel oil bombs, yet we don’t seem to worry about the diesel truck on the highway being driven by an illiterate high school dropout. Yet a nuclear plant that has operated for 40 years without any issues gets put under a microscope every day and still manages to function and it’s a source of danger and fear.

Eric G, when you speak of crop failures due to drought I can only assume you’re speaking of addressing the drought with desalination you spoke of. We have very little ground water left after 100 years of scalping rivers, pulling it from aquifers, etc. I live in west Texas and we’re in our 3rd year of horrible heat and almost no rain and we’ve been in a drought since 1993. We see no relief in sight or I should say, meteorologists here see none in sight. Desalination would be a great thing. We have another problem too and that’s being the repository for nuclear wastes almost exclusively from nuclear power. The record to this very day is bleak when it come to safety and the latest entry near Kermit Texas has it being store in a major aquifer that feeds the parts of the state south of there. Whether there’s a likelyhood of it bleeding into other aquifers if it leaks is the question nobody has assured us of and they won’t since it’s “Do it and worry about it later” attitude of industry. Yes, the bottom line, is just that, the bottom line for profit else we wouldn’t be getting all the wastes and by-products of this industry. The fact that the country is so sparsely settled is the very reason we get to receive the nations nuclear waste. It’s not because of the lack of danger but the fact that sparsely settled means very few people to try to combat the politicians and big money who want to take the easy way out. If nuclear energy is efficient, we need to address these problems in a responsible way and not just the best way to make the most profit. We get a great deal of PR about this and it’s all biased heavily to shut us up. What am I saying? Hell, we don’t have a water table left to pollute. Big ag has drained it dry and replaced it with RoundUp. Never mind.

We have a desal plant here in Victoria, Australia, built at a cost of $4 BILLION. In a state of 5 million people, guess what happens to our water bills? The plant has yet to produce a drop of water because we in the last 3 years have had so much rain. The plant takes the electrical output of one power station to run it. That’s 25% of our total state power consumption. The plant also uses chemicals that are on the banned list in Australia. Do NOT wish for a desal plant.

Can’t build nuclear plants in old mine shafts. The plants need water as a coolant. Kinda hard to get water in and out of those deep mine shafts.

Agreed Joeallen, that desal plant was a stupid idea. Funny how it always rains after a drought 😉

We pay for it in our water bills regardless whether it produces anything, same as stupid wind turbines actually. They get subsidies as above. The workers building it were paid enormous bonuses and perks out of our pockets.

I asked my neighbour here in Albury recently when he got solar panels on his house if I could plug my power tools in or my fridge when I wanted, because my taxes heavily subsidised his panels. That funny look on his face remains today.

Rev, I had a cotton farmer’s wife tell me last year she didn’t think the govt. “gave” them enough money. Funny, they only take mine…..for her. I’d have more sympathy if cotton had a market w/o a subsidy. I saw about 6 3/4 T 4WD diesel Chevy pickups there from brand new to about 10 years old, new Suburban in the garage. It must be tough.

Yes I know they need water as a coolant, the point is that it doesn’t take a lot of water neither with steam water reclaimers, they do it all the time in fossil steam powered generators. Check out Wyodak generator that uses very little sewer water in a dry desert to run its on site coal seam generator. Nor would it take a lake as a heat exchanger either as Wyodak shows. It would take the means to exchange heat to a cooler source that is for sure. Pumping or should I say allowing superheated steam to the surface to be used in the generator and in air cooled steam-water reclaimers and then sent back down to the reactor isn’t impossible you know. Its done with geothermal all the time.

Nor would you have to bury a reactor a mile under the earth, as I was being a bit facetious in saying this just to be funny. But at least a few 100 feet below the surface of the ground would be helpful to make a less ugly tomb and possibly seal a deadly catastrophy. When one see how they finally contained Chernobyl with a mound of dirt over the top, I see no reason why they shouldn’t have a little bit of sod on top.

Hot Rod, have you kept up with what’s going on with Chernobyl? Fish and animals there seem to be very healthy from their “hot” condition. In fact, they’re much healthier than their “cool” cousins. Humans also benefit from increased radiation, something I was never aware of until doing some reading about it and speaking to those who know more about the phenomenon than I. Here is another example of govt. screwing things up. If the Soviet Union hadn’t failed so miserably then there would be plenty documentation of how hot the animals got at first, if there was a big die-off, how many generations did it take for the levels to be possibly reduced and so on and so forth up to the present. As it was, I have doubts anyone has documented the whole thing from start to now. Then again, somebody who never lost funding to study all this may be just sitting on it somewhere, sorta like their huge stash of diamonds. Funding wouldn’t necessarily depend on govt.

Actually, water supplies only make nuclear power cheaper and easier. Without that, air cooled systems would still work (though they would probably be uneconomical), and practical systems that just cycle a stock of cooling water through cooling towers would have no trouble.

But it’s a non-issue for desalination anyway, because if you have salt water like sea water, you most probably have enough supplies to use that for cooling.

Texas A&M has a machine they are testing that turns oil well brine (west texas oil wells let our quite a bit of salt water with the oil) into potable water. For places with oil but not water, it could be a really handy thing,

phil, I sent out a post on a private forum this week-end about that. I pointed out rightly that our “boom” in the patch hasn’t been quite a boom since the new technology requires great amounts of water in the fracing stage….and we don’t have it in Tx., even in east Tx. right now and may never have it in my lifetime the way things are looking. This would certainly be a boon to the industry. And that reminds me to renew my sub to RigZone, an industry eletter that will print optimist articles, just don’t expect the bottom line on controversial subjects. There are others like it and they all do the same. I got lots of disinfo during the BP fiasco in the Gulf. I asked a friend who’s a welder if he was booming. Not so you can tell he said, things are pretty slow. I do like his nice new welding rig though even though it is black. Sure looks good and he left it running the hour he stayed. I guess other people don’t understand it but I generally keep gloves in my pocket so I can get back in w/o burning my hand. Been sorta hot.

I’d agree with you on the Zero Point Energy. We also agree that there is a difference between useful energy and that which is unattainable by say entropy. And still the world is awash with useful energy. Notice I did say useful energy I believe even in my previous comment. I suppose the energy I’m talking about is still nuclear at its origin and the famous conversion between matter and energy still correct, but it doesn’t take nuclear reactors as in fission to tap it. Nor did I say wind turbines are an answer, nor did I say solar cells are the answer. Quite frankly, everyone always comes back to the same tired ways of harnessing energy, because many are boneheads. That may not be you but you’ve allowed them to cloud your brain with mainstream thoughts of how hard it is to get energy from this world and thus haven’t seen the obvious by creativity of opening up your intellect.

The real boneheads, which isn’t you BTW. I’m not talking to those types of people who keep looking for experts (Superman) to save them, and I don’t give a crap about them period. They can all go starve the evil bastards and theives they are. They do love one another too. As I said there is no reason to be a philantropist of ideas to be f’ed over by Cainnites while making them more powerful like they did with Tesla and Farnsworth. Tesla and Farnsworht these are the more publicized cases but not even close to the numbers of good being used and thrown out by cainnites. The system is rigged for the evil and long as the productive keep giving them what they want (free knowledge) for nothing, like slaves in an empire, then the evil will become more powerful while abusing and centralizing that knowledge into their powerful institutions. Evil an stupid people should never be allowed to have such powerful thoughts and they funnel them through their institutions. Why do you think they need you to worship those institutions? They don’t have the antenna to the information bank and thus have to parasitically extract it from those that do. And they will shit on the slave boys while they are at it too. The meek shall not support these types at all if they are to survive. Let them starve on their own stupidity, people I’m talking to I advise to ask yourselves what do you get out of enabling the masses with an idea. If it bares bad fruit for you then its bad fruit for all good people period!

Back again to power, despite all the wrong threads of how solar won’t work, it actually is a another powerful source is still a very effective way to generate energy (1 KW/meter^2) even outside the method (semi-electronic nuclear structure) I’m hinting at and its still available on the cheap, while solar cells are the wrong approach to harness solar. Again the method of utilizing it and harnessing is the problem you spite and not the amount available which the world is awashed in. And nobody and I mean nobody that has answers to even utilizing the solar energy is going to go build a model so that they can’t sell their wares on a national power grid. Why???? Why work for bastards for free? Answer: I believe that is the reason the economy is dying in additon to all the muckery that is its sword, the productive have finally gotten the message that they are expected to contribute intellectually and then die off starving for the impotent and stupid who like nice things somebody else did the labor of thought for them.

As far as conventional ideas, people will always revolve back to nuclear power as in fission. Because they understand it. Its just the way the average man feels safe and confident in big central mother bell, and they want big mama power too. Everyone has bought into the economy of scale argument even when it doesn’t work. There is not economy of scale because the real economy is from the individual soul BTW. Even sharing capital of material production is inconsequential to the real economic power of innovative human thought, physical capital though important becomes diminishing in its importance in todays world.

Still conventional nuclear power as far as fission and the way they implement the whole thing above ground is just playing Russian Roulette. People can argue that its safe because of new technlogy. While the french re-breed the waste, but you know even the French are playing a time bomb of complex process. Complex processes and engineering always fail, its just playing the statistics of overconfidence and stupidity to think otherwise. Fission is not safe, and Fukushima will not be the last case either. Its going to happen again many times and with the so called modern plants as well (Fission). And a 1000 years of half life in the farming soil we eat out of is not a good answer, and this is what mother bell will generate I guarantee. Group think and group implement will always wrought the same failure. Not all the nuclear fissionable power in the world is worth one Fukushima, especially when I said it before that the earth is flooded with useful energy. And I’m not going to give anyone that answer BTW as I always say if you can’t figure it out then oh well.

Besides that those above ground nuclear tombs are fugly, but they are also dangerous, stupid, centralized, and unnecessary for the intellect of Gods people. Ignore them and be studious but don’t support them is my motto.

One last comment. I’d just like to point out thousands of years ago people were obviously harnessing energy with pyramids. I thought as a kid we’d be doing the same now. Certainly I realize the need for the powerful not to do so. I was in a pyramidal house once and felt “something” I couldn’t describe. The owner was very happy and healthy, had nothing but good things to say about it and would probably have said more had he not been intimidated by sheer ignorance so much from those around him. He hinted at things to me and my wife but we weren’t good friends so he held back to a great degree. It always made me want to build a structure like that and find out for myself. Well, I never had the funds and would have run up against the old “it’s so weird and has wasted space” thing from the wife. She did seem impressed though.

We are told they were tombs for the Egyptian kings… yet no bodies have (apparently) ever been found within, there are no inscriptions/murals to that effect (as is typical of known Egyptian royal burial vaults). It’s weird.

The structures seem almost mechanical – utilitarian. As if they had a function.

I’ve read that, originally, they were cased in white limestone and, at the apex, had a special stone of unknown (to us) purpose.

There is abundant circumstantial evidence of some sort of unknown (to us) technology in use in antiquity. Not just in Egypt, either. Look into (if you haven’t already) the structures at Puma Punku:

It should say something that when people from disciplines outside of archeology look at stuff from their field, geology, engineering, what have you, the archeologists ideas fall apart.

As to Puma Punku And Tiwanaku I don’t think they are machined but to prove it I have to go there. They aren’t measuring for draft. I believe they may be molded rather than machined. Machining gives right angles. Molding would produce angles that are just barely greater than 90. Usually 90.5 to 93 degrees. (for an inside hole). Same with some casting processes. This is so the part comes off the mold. Or a intermediate stage comes off a mold.

Now most people like these guys would measure 91 degrees and admire the near perfection. If that sort of thing repeats then it isn’t near perfection, it is the consistency of tooling.

eric, I think there’s supposed to be some sort of energy process happening where things are equidistant from all sides, in the top of a pyramid. I’d certainly like to try living in one. If you learned nothing else, you’d at least have an idea there wasn’t anything happening….which I doubt……but it could be just another pyramidal structure….but don’t put in your pocket, then it would be just another coin.

I have never seen anything that advanced in primitive anthropological sites. I’ve always speculated that entire advanced civilizations as great or better might have existed and vanished long ago. When one thinks how almost all iron tools would rust back to nothingness in less than two centuries, nothing but the oddest of stone structures could be left of such a society.

Advanced society is actually very fragile, even our own as it would take just one generation not passing on knowledge or methods and it would be back to the stone age for the most part.

Three thoughts come to my mind. One being the tower of babylon being in the bible talking about an advanced society reaching into the heavens. The second which probably sounds bizarre when placed in context of what most people want to believe, is that out of all those billions of stars like ours that indeed we have been visited by advanced society. The third being something my wife suggested is if the great knowledge was lost by the cainnite bumpkins that burned down the library of Alexandria. And I’ll add one more in terms of not just space but space-time, that indeed moving in the fourth dimension is also a possibilty understanding the fields of gravity and electromagnetics. The idea that Shroedenger’s equation lending to multiple and infinite parallel universes interacting and exchangine through probability and observation, it becomes very likely that tranversing these dimensions through advanced civilzation not just light years away but right here at different possible outcomes of this earth. How bizarre is it really that freedom fighters from our future in a opressed tyranny break loose using technology not to some island or distant planet but back to a parallel universe in earths time. The thoughts are boggling and humorous to the boneheads who don’t like anything they can’t play and understand in their ape hands.

As far as moving stones with say levitating machinery, that could only be done in my opinion that first understood electricity and magnetism. Strangely Babylon might have been something that has occured multiple times, and what about the great flood? Overall, mankind could travel and visit the planets right now, maybe even the stars in a century without government. But it seems that the more advanced a society becomes in common knowledge the more potential for the cainnites to expropriate it for evil. The understanding of nuclear energy just being a common example, one the understanding that mass and energy are interchangeable (BTW this is because mass is captured charge), how long before we built weapons to annihiliate all of mankind on this knowledge. What happens when the primitive in spirituality can go to the library say 100 years from now and know how to convert a cup full of water into their very own nuclear weapon? What about governments being able to reprogram dissidents (the real creators of knowledge) so that advanced society dies? I’m guessing this is probably why most advanced civilizations die, at some point it becomes imperative that enough faith and knowledge comes together that the ability by spiritually advanced people to understand, gets shared with primitively evil people who misuse it.

When one understands that such a civilization that built the pyramids were also mathematical advanced, that they understood at minimum trigonometry and the Pythagorean thereom. Its only a short jump from pythagorean thereom to vector mathematics and even Eulers Theory of imaginary-real numbers. Add to this the advanced machining shown by Eric’s provided links, then I think that its possible that we can conclude that an ingenious society has existed many times possibly on this earth. Its is also somewhat concerning that history could repeat again if true, and I have an idea that almost all these societies have died from political and theving scumbags.

Hot Rod, Stone is the only thing that will last countless millenia and maybe the pyramids were built for no other reason than they can’t fall down and will take countless millenia to crumble. Consider the relatively young Earth and how what we think of as a long time is nothing in perspective, the blink of a blink of an eye. A friend recently sent a new study of the universe that indicated there were, and get this, a Billion planets with similar conditions to Earth in the universe. I don’t think the Inca’s drew people in space suits just for the novelty of it. How many times could you draw beings and put them in random scenarios before you’d come up with a space suit? Consider the lines drawn across S. America that obviously are meant to be viewed from orbit. Yeh, I know there are those who say they were just drawing these lines and that they were guidelines to various things on earth. That’s not likely in my book. Why the hell would they only be able to be seen in their entirety and only mean something when seen that way? Mankind may never figure out what has happened in the past since M.N. is great at recycling. I read just yesterday where deposits of gold were almost certainly where celestial bodies impacted the Earth, since gold is found on comets and other space “stuff”. It’s almost too much to consider some times. I’ve been dreaming about it and asking these questions since I was small. Academia blew off some of the greatest minds, sci fi writers, but they were very smart people who could see beyond some result that made men rich or powerful. Arthur C. Clarke was the first person to propose GSO satellites among other things. It’s the people who can look beyond that give us the most hope although we don’t want to forget people like Herman Potocnik who actually drew up the first orbits and designed the first space station well before space flight began. My cousin and I used to lie out at night and dream of the stars when we were children. It was over-powering then, still is.

Eight you said a lot of things that are the truth. I’d always conveniently assumed that the pyramids were indeed done by the Egyptians Pharaohs with slave labor. Bible eludes to such an idea. The thing is that archeologist have supposedly dug up more primitive and simpler pyramids that were what they said basic prototypes to Giza. Some of these crude pyramids were built with dirt hill inside as a ramp used as interior mold form and ramp to lift the bigger bricks up into position. The masonry was also pretty sloppy by the way.

Suppose however that indeed the archaelogist got it backwards and the sloppier pyramids were in fact the later pyramids that the Egyptians tried to emulate from a more preadvanced but more technogical society. The Inca pyramids are also a rather interesting analogy to the Egyptians, why another society worlds and times away, would choose the pyramid form. Is it because the pyramid is one of the most stable architectures, because as your wife correctly points out building pyramids is a waste of volume. The pyramid could be meant to be a lasting marker for generations as you say because its was also one of the most stable of structures. The naturally sloped roof is good for loading both from snow, water, and wind. Or could it be as many others here speculate and energy accumulator, possibly a communication device ( a primitive crystal radio) across the earth? Me myself I don’t see any reason it would work as an energy multiplier. Visiting the Luxor in LV a couple of times I never felt that compelled by the shape as having much noticeable power to it, and I believe I walked the whole perimiter to see if my hair would stand up on end (smile), which means I was open to the idea at least a couple of times. I never brought a voltmeter or spectrum analyzer if that even was something of importance. Beings communication over long distance would most likely be electromagnetic or by gravitational waves (very-very unlikely gravity) one would think that some misisng element would have to be conductor (metal of some sort), possibly a crystal, or semiconductor like a point contact diode. All of this stuff would have been stripped bare by later primitives visiting such sites and taken back and lost as souveneirs across the world and ages. Also what was on the outside as say a conductor or apex stone or crystal, most likely would have been oxidized over time or again stolen, if the primary one would think oxidized metal would still exist in the ground or on the stones. It was rather interesting now that Eric’s link showed the magnetic properties of the so called Inca Ruins Masonry, what comes to mind is iron or an oxide of some sort but why the residual magnetism? This could in fact even be that iron or nickel oxide of what used to be a reduced and pure metal? Again I don’t even have a clue how such a pyramid would say amplify electrical currents (which do exist in earth ground) and then convert say to another form of energy or be utilized by electronics as a power source to drive say a radio trasmitter/receiver or transmitter. Anyone that went to that extreme as using something that megalith to make a radio transmitter or even a weak electrical field generator would be quite stupid, when Marconi and first pioneers did radio communciation with something very small first time round using capacitors, inductors and spark air gaps, along with something very similar to crystals and diodes very similar to Shottky (metal barrier) using rudimentary electronics. If a society had the means to generate electricity or large lift levitating gravitics power (requiring some knowledge of electricity if antigravity) which would be a prerequisite in my opinion to explain a society that also had advanced machining skills, why the hell would they utilize brick stones to get natural but limited currents from the ground? Seems like the power to build such structures would be immense to what they returned in output. All considering this I’m thinking more that the masonry was meant more as a long testament of a past society to show future generations of their technological prowness. Something that would last as you said much longer than any other form of structure. It still wouldn’t negate though that the masonry and skills of building such structures would have been advanced, nor explain how such a feat was accomplished.

Another thing I’ll say is that possibly the idea of advanced civilization is to not make stuctures that are out of sintered ceramic or even concrete, which would be much easier in constructing but intead out of natural stones cut out of quarries. This is why many people say such a civilization was actually unadvanced, But suppose that the idea is when a society becomes so advanced that natural is actually more aesthetic because of its natural form of shaping (art) but also because of its difficulty would be more testament to future generations of their technological prowness? I’m mixed on all these conflicting things, but the exact machining shown on the youtube video sure lends some credibility and as BrentP stated makes one wonder how silly archealogists don’t even discuss the machining exactness that wouldn’t be acheivable with a chisel. Gee whiz…historical academia fails again to think critical and open minded! At very minimum it seems to accomplish such lifting feets that conventional and motor powered cranes would have been needed.

As far as the cainnites they always laugh and snicker at anything that they think isn’t sensible to their inner sensitivities. They are a thicket of pomposity and always hang the Galileo’s of their time and then worship them the next generation with such narcism that they say they’d have been different. Many science fiction writers are being proven right, and without creativity of spanning the gap of possibilities of solutions what good is a scientist? No good. When you see how the cainnite scumbags work over and over in time its not suprising to see how people such as Tesla are treated even as his inventions are beyond that of a hustler or sci fi writer. You shake the foundations too much of the elite and they will be sure to hang you for heresy, meanwhile they’ll claim and use those secrets and give them to named respectable folks. I’ve lived enough to see how so called humanity works as most of you probably have. It doesn’t take much to extrapolate that nothing is new under the sun, or may I say under the stars?

Arthur C. Clarke was right though that we do belong to a collective unconscious, or should I disagree and say we belong to the collective of intelligence and conscious? It has to do with our connection with the intelligence of this universe as I’ve discussed many times, there is defnitely reason and creation going on through all time and all ages. Ideas and knowledge are immortal as time itself and exists in our spirtual world as truth, then manifests as a possibility to fullfill one such possibility in our lives. We are very powerfully connected as were the ancients to all this information and creation going on around us.

Hot Rod, I certainly won’t argue anything you said. It’s hard to speculate from that distance of time….whatever that distance might accurately be. I’ve thought of the Incan pyramids too and can’t help but think they are related in purpose. Could a pyramid be the foundation for an outside structure? Wasn’t Tesla’s “energy accumulator” a pyramidal structure also? If there were an outer part that could function something like an energy accumulator or an antenna, a bi-directional antenna then whoever used it might have taken it with them or it could have oxidized to nothing. The pyramid lends itself to a tight fit of an outer covering that would have no need of attachment other than the tight fit. They could have held something valuable enough to not leave or maybe almost ethereal. Either or. The answer is there if we just think of it hard enough. The broad answer of course is that we have left a stone unturned, something that will make it all fall into place. I can’t feel too bad at not having solved it ha ha. Better minds than mine have considered it their entire lifetimes and still no definite answer. And that brings us back to “how many millenia has current man considered these questions?” Does the scientific community agree on a definite timeline for the mid-east pyramids? And aren’t the Incan pyramids of a different era? Or is it just the Inca’s who are the different era? Confusing eh?

It’s fascinating, isn’t it, that two cultures whom we are told were separated by a vast ocean and great distances, that never came into contact with one another, nonetheless both built not just pyramids but cities of them, laid out in a precise grid, with celestial orientations?

eric, finding out about Titicaca certainly added to the mystery. Thanks for the link, been a long time since I’d read any of that. We really have no idea how many advanced cultures have come and gone on Earth. And now they think they have discovered Atlantis, something that could not have been done before the advanced sonar along with GPS mapping we have today. Every time I hear Titicaca I’m transported back to a single digit age when that was The funniest name we’d ever heard. Even the girls had sly grins. Titicaca could keep the boys going for the entire class and beyond. After all, those were two of the dirtiest names we knew right together. Damn, I am old.

Here is how archeologists know when and who built the great pyramid. At least according to the books I’ve read.

This guy (I forget his name) in the 19th century was exploring the great pyramid using explosives. Yeah, that’s how they rolled. He was always running short of funding too. So he finds an iron plate in the debris one day. This is dismissed. It is claimed he planted it. Doesn’t jive with the conventional story line. No iron. So later on he is finds this little room that had been sealed off since construction. On the wall he finds a cartouche that confirms the existing theory that Cheops (sp?) built it. That is accepted by his peers. And that’s how they know when and by who it was built with absolute certainty.

That’s it.

Lot’s of accepted history is based on evidence that is even more sketchy than that. To dislodge any of it requires a mountain of evidence that is several thousand times greater both in volume and quality.

BrentP, don’t leave out the trail…as in follow the money. Many of these guys were able to connect the dots just as you say but for no other reasons than power and money and continued money through their lives. It doesn’t seem to make much difference what country they were from.

I’ll finish this topic of pyramids by just a little statement about the power of the triangle. Now many people will correctly state that the triangle is of no more power than say the circle and they are absolutely right. Constant Pi and the power of the geometry of the circle are also a basic theme of all science and math and therefore physical law.

But on the little triangle. I remember for the longest time in my engineering studies I was always plagued about pythagorean theoreom. Everyone stated it, everyone used it. It was used in vector mathematics and vector calculus. But back then I never had seen an exact proof of its derivation. Would it not seem strange that relativity also uses the pythagorean theorem in the Lorentz transforms of space and time? That space and time and speed of light would revolve back to the pythagorean thereom, the circle (or sphere) as well? And one night I went to bed and I saw the beauty of pythagorean thereom. It was genius as I saw it in fluidic form, the problem is that I didn’t wake from my sleep to record my thoughts that night. I did however dream many other things in my sleep that were exact and just as real and correct, the difference was that I lucidly woke myself up to record them. Then fiddle with them and verify their mathematical correctness. One such was why the shortest path between points is 120 degree segments, why a soap bubble computer worked. I woke up to record the theory from my dream and it was absolutely correct at explaining why the soap bubble computer always give a possible minimal short path. But back to the pythagorean thereom, never did I in consciousness see what I saw that one night on the eloquent beauty of triangles an pythagorean thereom. I slept and forgot it.

I did however manage to figure out an exact derivation proof for the right triangle and pythagorean theorem many years later. I’m not sure if you’d find this online as almost everything can be googled, but what I realized is that if you break a right triangle into a further of two right triangles, then do a ratio of sides of the two triangles, you’ll get with a bit of algebra c^2=a^2+b^2. I wish I had remembered that dream as there is something more that I can’t remember about it. Something scary and something beautiful as well. Well if any of you do have that dream again for me please let me in on the details?

“Could a pyramid be the foundation for an outside structure? Wasn’t Tesla’s “energy accumulator” a pyramidal structure also? If there were an outer part that could function something like an energy accumulator or an antenna, a bi-directional antenna then whoever used it might have taken it with them or it could have oxidized to nothing. The pyramid lends itself to a tight fit of an outer covering that would have no need of attachment other than the tight fit”

Yes you are correct that Tesla used a coned structure (something like a pyramid) to increase the flux density of magnetic fields of lines on the secondary coil (near the top). Basically Faraday’s Law and Lenz’s law state that the induced EMF (electromotive force–basically voltage) is equal to the rate of change of enclosed flux lines that cross that conductor, therefore by tapering the top of the cone the magnetic flux density is increased. This is basically true when a substance of high permeability (magentic carrying capability) like iron, ferrite, or nickel as example are used.

So I suppose if the Inca’s or pre-advanced society was using a magnetic core for the bricks or an iron type covering then it would possess the same characteristics as a tesla coil. The problem becomes what would be used as the primary current or induction current to create the fields of line to be amplified in a secondary. I suppose on such source could be the magento of earths inner iron core. Turns out that many now hypothesize that the earth’s interior is a oozing flow of convective iron, the motion of the iron induces a current that causes a magnetic field and vice versa just like an induction motor or squirrel cage. Ever take apart one of these motors and you’ll find no permanent magnet but just a conductive cage in the center. In the induction motor the primary rotational field is created on the stator coils on the side of the motor, these induce a magnetic field into the rotor, the moving and changing rotating magentic field in the (rotor) squirrel cage create a circulatory current to oppose change of the magnetic fields of line, which creates a magnetic field back to interact with the stator coils. So if the earths interior generates a magnetic field off of motion of fluid iron inside the center of it and creates its own dyanamo by this motion just like an induction motor, then in effect that means that these fields of line can induce voltage into a conductor just like Tesla’s secondary coil. What would be missing is the material for high permeability (like say Iron), and insulated and conductive wiring (say copper or some metal). Further, the interesting thing about faraday’s law is that in order to induce a continuing EMF you have to have a changing magnetic field not a constant one. Putting a permanent static magnet up to a coil of wire creates no voltage, but moving the magnet will. So one might automatically assume that the earth’s dynamo would be of no use to say a secondary coil, since earth polar field is nearly static. Tesla however showed that there is some ELF (Extra Low Frequency) oscillations of current flowing through the earth possibly by the same Dyanamo. So I suppose that this could have been the aim of the primitive but advanced society, is to couple into the ELF (1-10 Hz) stuff and use it as power.

Or maybe just maybe and I’m going on a limb here, the earths dynamo might induce a DC voltage into a secondary. Now you might think I’m crazy and contradicting myself because I just said that in order to produce voltage the field of line have to be changing and thus one would think alternating current. But I believe I saw a generator used long ago where one permanent magnet was used on a spinning disk, the outside of the wheel was a DC + and the inside of the wheel was a DC -. The reason was that though the magentic fields of line were constant, the wheel was rotating and crossing these fields, The entire disk wheel all had magnetic field of lines cutting across the entire Disk equally.

Ah for a second there I was actually going to erroneously assume that the moving magentor iron in the core could induce a DC field into a static coil, but actually I was wrong so forget the above paragraph. It would take a alternating magnetic field (which do exist) originating from earths core for a Tesla coil analogy of a pyramid. Further as I said you’d have to include some missing ingredients like coils of wire and high permeability magnetic type materials in and aroudn the pyramid to focus the fields. Also orientation of the secondary coil at the top of the pyramid with respect to say the dynamo interior of the earth would be important. As the lines of magnetic field would have to cut perpendicular tot he secondary coil.

Anyway its a thought and I don’t mind hypothesizing on Eric’s site. Its all fun speculation. I still think the pyramids were a show of monument acheivement and not a generator or transmitter but who knows?

Thought about it some last night and realized that I was wrong about the Tapering of the Tesla core (cone) increasing the flux lines. Actually no such thing happens as the number of flux lines is constant (like current) in a series circuit of magnetic reluctance. I confused flux density with flux lines. Rate of change of flux lines by faraday’s law creates the voltage so the flux lines being constant at any one particular point in time throughout the volume of the Tesla core, despite the cone taper between secondary and primary. I do remember reading that one of the things of the Tesla coil was that the resonance between primary and secondary was important and thus the ratio of secondary to primary. I’m guessing that this is the real reason for the conical taper on a Tesla? I’ll look into it. As I’m not really a Tesla coil expert and just went with the whole brainstorm for fun being connected to say pyramids. Again I really don’t think the pyramids were much more than an architectureal feature, I don’t blame anyone who thinks there is more to them though.

Hot Rod, I was simply hypothesizing without any real data. Pyramids are one of the few things I can remember accessing a large amount of material on before internet. I recall something about storing perishables in the top most part of a pyramid and having it last much longer. I believe they used to have an experiment you could perform yourself by building a small pyramidal structure and putting milk somewhere in the top of it and keeping it fresh well beyond what it would be fresh in an other container. Seems like it alluded to the eventual shape of milk containers that the industry has gotten away from with better refrigeration techniques and less whole(fat) milk in nearly all of it including whole milk. And since you bring it up, flux lines would stay the same although density does change. I missed that.

Hot Rod, CJ and I just returned from a semi-ill-fated trip to repair the lawn mower. I remembered seeing the tarp we use to keep warmth in during winter on the wellhead, sand separator, pressure tank, etc. so I got it by a corner(don’t know why the wife took it off)and drug it out. Sure enough, a rattler coiled up under it. I used a shovel to dislocate it’s head almost. Somehow got it past CJ and was going to send a pic but can’t figure out how to post it. We go into the barn in the big door where it’s windy and I start tearing it down. I see CJ lunge hard and know what he’s going after, a paper wasp, bad boys. He snacked it and got bit on the tongue but ran into a jackstand and wasps go everywhere prompting me to leave and retrieve him from the yard where he’s rolling. As a nearly grown pup he raised up under a trailer into a plate sized nest, got stung countless times and his head got big as a basketball. He was really sick and the vet(emergency trip after hours naturally)gave him steroids and other things to combat it. It was touch and go for a while. Now he’s bonkers for revenge and attacks them everywhere. There’s a huge amount of them this year as well as rattlers and all sorts of bad flora, I’m assuming due to the bad drought and exceptional heat. I reminded him about revenge, good reminder for me too. Hhmm, maybe he’s a product of my need for revenge. Tiny liked to go through a hole underneath the side of the pumphouse and so does Wyne the other big tom. Wyne got snakebit right off this year and now I wonder if that’s what Tine got into. Damn, wish I could purge under a store room we have and everywhere else for that matter. We’ve had a problem with prairie rattlers the last 5 years with one getting into the wash room in the house last year. I treaded lightly for a long time. They’re supposed to be 10X as powerful venom as diamondbacks like I killed today.

Now to many of you this may not be a big deal, but for a conniseur of truths it just shows how powerfull the internet is. I spent several years in high school and engineering college and never found one textbook on the proof of pythagorean thereom. I searched everywhere to see if I could re-verify what I had forgot in that dream, but to no avail. Today I just did a google search for pythagorean thereom Wiki and the wiki came up with the exact proofs, including the one above I was talking about being fluidic. This may not seem like a big thing to some of you but it helps me immensely in understanding relativity even more from a fluidic standpoint. You got to love the internet really!! All this because of the conversation started by Eight on Eric’s forum and the interent wiki, wow!!

Hot Rod, I enjoyed it. I wish I’d had some type of hand book for things like that back when I was always constructing something, sorta like an Ugly’s book for electricity, a practical guide as it were. I used to always be using a regional buyers guide and contacting people to find formulas before the internet. I dearly love the internet. Back in 80’s and 90’s I was constantly have $300/mnth phone bills. Big bucks then, still is for phone service.

Well I researched why Tesla used the coned structure on some of his coils. Turns out that a Tesla coil isn’t like a conventional transformer. The idea of a Tesla coil isn’t a a single cycle of input power to single cycle of output continuous power like a loaded tranformer in power transmission or step up downs. A Tesla coil utilzes the secondary as a resonant tank circuit basically an L-C resonance circuit to amplify the primary current. Assuming for example when a spark isn’t discharging of the sperical capacitor and discharge terminal because it hasn’t exceeded breakdown voltage. The the power will resonant like a swing back and forth between the secondaries inductor (which is also its secondary) and the capacitor (sphere, donut on top). Of course the primary will continue to add more power to the secondary tank circuit if its resonanting at the same frequency and phase as the primary. Hence why the secondary must also be the right inductor (coil turns and diameter) along with the capacitance of sphere electrode to match the primary L-C in frequency. Most people including Tesla would fine tune the primary circuit to match the secondary in frequency not the other way around. Here we see then that Tesla experimented with cylinder and tapered cone type secondaries. With the coned secondary you get several effects:

1. You get some magentic coupling to the primary along the whole length of coil. Since the coils preceding it don’t absorb all the RF first there is some ability to pick up more magentic flux fields even though they decrease with distance from the primary as well as the loop area would get smaller thus reducing the flux lines intersected.

2.) There are two types of L-C tank or resonant circuits. One being a lumped circuit where the L and the C are highly divisible and seperated by offset in distance, this is classical L-C circuitry engineers analyze in their electronic theory. The there is what is called distributed L-C or transmission resonant circuits. The idea is to take the same total L and total C, but distribute them in series or parallel continously over distance. The end result for a distributed L-C circuit is you get a transmission resonance similar to a open ended coaxial. In coax the input wave reflects and the propagation speed of electricity all the way to the end of the coax, doubles at the open end and relects back. Or if there is a short on the end of the coax transmission the reflected electical wave will invert at a short, if it again meets another short on the input source (equivalent to a low impedance source) youll get a resonant wave moving back and forth through coax with a very high Q (low resistance loss). So basically using a distributed L-C using the natural L-C in the windings you don’t need to have the lumped sphere at the top, and should generate higher frequencies of osillation for the same total L-C. Tesla used the tapered coils to thus get higher power and shorter arcs, and the distributed or lumped cylinder with spheres on top to get longer length (higher voltage-larger arc lengths) but less coupled or continous power.

3) Because what you got is a resonant swing effect in a Tesla coil secondary, that is the higher the swing goes (more gravitational potential energy at maxium pendulum swing) the more energy in the secondary coil system, until discharge removes some of that energy. What you want is for every coil to directly couple magnetically to the primary, but not to couple capacitively to its nearby coil (parasitic unless distributed transmission where you use this parallel capacitance for its resonance point), The coned structure does both alowing each additional turn to couple to the primary without RF shielding from its coils below it and by turning them inwards to a point of the taper cone they are also moving inwards away from each other (thus reducing the capacitive coupling between adjacent coil turns). This means it takes less cycles of primary power to fully charge the secondary resonant circuit, meaning more continuous power can be delivered to the disharge terminal for the coned structure.

4). Also Tesla coils don’t utilize high magneitc permeability (iron, nickel, cobalt, ferrite, etc) cores like power transformers, again the idea isn’t about get a 1 cycle input to a 1 cycle output voltage, but rather a example 100 cycles of resonant primary input to a 1 cycle discharge output (when exceeding breakdown voltage), so they don’t need the strong magnetic coupling exhibited by power electronics. This has many advantages in reducing the parasistic capacitance between turns and to the core itself if metallic like iron.

Given all the above factors even though the magnetic fields get weaker as you proceed with turns from the primary with a cone secondary you still get stronger coupling to the primary, you get distributed resonance, you get less parallel and parasitic capacitance between ajdacent turns, but unfortunately your area gets smaller for each turn meaning flux densityxArea=flux will be also decreasing. Tesla found that the cone structure will all the conflicting attributes and properties above resulted in a near linear increase in voltage per additional coil turn on the cone.

Eight and Eric I hope you can make sense about what I was saying above about the Tesla coil cone version. You know the more I review some of Tesla’s ideas as an electrical design engineer with over 20 years of experience in my belt, the more genius I find it all. Like most people I read about Tesla and was fascinated about him when I was 16 years old, but did not have the electrical theory understanding at that time, so it was kind of a bit of magic to me then and this is how most see him I suppose. Its totally different however when revisiting him now and shelfing his designs for 20 years, coming back to look them over and they all make total sense.

Though re-visiting the Tesla coil thing on here has not only opened me up to study things like Pythagorean theory again where I was pleased to find a new proof for old ideas. But it also made me aware of some of his words and how they relate to some of my own thoughts and discoveries. Years ago when I read his biography as a kid I do remember his claims that indeed he had tapped into the earths magnetic magneto dynamo of power. With Tesla one doesn’t know how much was publicity stunts for fund raising. He was obviously talented beyond all words, but he also made strange overtures at contacting martians to get attention and funding for his radio receivers. My take on the guy was that he was so brilliant that he had an intuition to make most of his inspiration of exotic proclamations come true. He might have also had limited experiments that he knew and drew from when expanding his proclamations. He was also obviously very mathematical and model oriented as he declined relativity because of its lack of physical model. My own experience is that relativity is an absolute truth so I disagree with Tesla on that, but for years I too believed that relativity was a joke until verifying it indeed was true in my own lab studies. He was wrong on his dismissal and rejection of relativity, but then again he made conclusions such as gravity that seem to be true also from my own studies. So how to see all this? Well his mind modeling was so superb that he was able to get at the gist of things without fully putting the mathematics down on paper?? I would say that Tesla had a great ability to visualize in his head ideas, something that is lacking by most standards in people calling themselves scientist today.

The idea that pyramids would be connected to Tesla Coil theory somehow? Still a lot of things missing to it but who knows? Always worth having an open mind as they say.

I now don’t think of Tesla as being anything but a regular human being (as compared to a teenager where I believed he could see sparks on cats fur), but I do see him as someone that was intellect, spiritual, imaginative, creative, and a truth seeker. I’d say he was an engineer and scientist wrapped up in one but he was also a Godly person because of the traits I mentioned, he surely wasn’t an evil cainnite theif that is the norm of today in growing pantheons of numbers.

Anyway, I’ll think about it some more and study his Tesla receiver designs to see how that could have integrated into his beliefs of free power from earth’s internal dynamo. I might let you all in it if I figure something out, then again I might tell some of you or even none depending how much use it has to me.

Anyway about it HARP is definitely part of Tesla’s study from my studies. Gravity as well since Tesla and I formulated the same conclusion on longitudinal gravity waves. Of course I differ quite a bit from pumping electrons into the earths magnetic derived fields to induce earthquakes per say by reversing or resonanting with it dynamo. The longitudinal wave I see originates from the atomic structure not earths dynamo core as a macro engine.

Hot Rod, I don’t grasp all this but in summation when you said “you get distributed resonance, you get less parallel and parasitic capacitance between ajdacent turns, but unfortunately your area gets smaller for each turn meaning flux densityxArea=flux will be also decreasing.” and I’m thinking but at what rate? Linear? Exponential? and then you make it clear it’s linear in relation to each extra coil. So is there a way to get an exponential increase? Just asking. Is there anywhere I can find visual aids for this? BTW, how are kitties? How are you and wife? Sorry, I sorta obsess about these things.

Hot Rod, my whole life I have noticed a relationship between music and mathematics. I notice musicians seem to comprehend mathematics to a degree beyond the ordinary. I’ve often wondered if Tesla was a musician too. I was listening to the microwave one day and just figure out what percentage setting it was on by the beats of it’s magnetron turning on and off. Nobody else seems to notice the “play” button on the DVD player but I can time it down to a tiny partial of a second so that the “play” on the screen never goes away but you don’t see it over ridden either. I don’t try to do this, it just happens. Once I revved an engine up a few times I never had to look at a tach again to know it’s speed. I always wondered if my uncle was a good musician since he could synchronize a transmission with the engine very closely. I was busy and had a guy get in my truck one day. When he got out he was surprised, said he’d always thought it was an auto from hearing me drive it. To me, it’s just like playing music.

I think the best way to visualize it is your own head with your own imagination. And the best way to do this in my experience is to think by analogy to a mechanical system. So here is one example of how to see the Tesla coil as a musical instrument as you correctly point out that matehmatically inclined people are also probably more adept to being musical?

Imagine that you have two tuning forks seperated by air. One of these forks which induces the power by a periodic and repeated direct mechanical strike for ringing from us will be called the primary fork. The secondary fork wil absorb the incident acoustic waves from the primary fork, but will have no input mechanical power from us directly. In addition we rig the secondary fork so that it is dampened when its maximum vibration amplitudes exceeds a given threshold, so that we take some energy off the secondary fork (this is equivalent to what happens on the secondary coil when it breaks down the air and loses energy with a discharge). So as one would expect the primary fork begins to vibrate but if the primary doesn’t have the same resonant frequency to the secondary fork the secondary fork will not vibrate. If however the primary fork is tuned to the secondary fork until their resonance is matched, the secondary tuning fork will start to vibrate in phase and at the same frequency as the primary fork. Assuming no discharge or loss and the secondary tuning fork would continue to build up oscillation to infnity over long enough time, but remember we will discharge the secondary if it gets to high of an amplitude vibration (spark gap ignition of the sphere on top on Tesla coil analogy) so the loss will keep the secondary fork oscillating but not getting overly excessive in swing resonation energy. How much coupling can I get from the primary tuning fork to the secondary tuning fork? If I rarify the air the coupling will get less, and if I compress the air the coupling will become stronger. The resonant system thus will still reach the same maxium (output swing- voltage) no matter if there is strong coupling or weak coupling, simply because in a pefect resonant system even if there is less energy it will build up but more slowly in oscillaiton amplitude. Therefore if there is weak coupling though that every time we take a hit with an analogical spark breakdown (when amplitude reaches its maxium threshold) we should expect a weaker coupling between the two forks to take longer between sparks because it takes more cycles of tuning fork primary to get the secondary to reach its threshold. Thus is the same in a Tesla Coil. The idea of usual transformer is to get the strongest coupling possible between the primary and secondary by using a high permeability core to wrap the windings on (equivalent to more dense air between forks), but a Tesla coil was made to work best without a strong medium of coupling between secondary and primary. It can do this because it relies on the swinging pendulum of secondary tuning fork (elastic modulus potential energy to kinetic energy and vice versa) to hold the energy of the last push on the swing, and then reinforce it again next cycle. In this case of zero losses it will always be guaranteed to get a secondary to reinforce even without an iron/ferrite/nickel core. Again it sacrafices continuous power however for peak power at spark, and also the amount of coupling still determines how often we get a streamer or spark to occur.

Again acoustics are the best analogy to wrap your head around a Tesla coil operation. If you want strong coupling you wouldn’t want the forks to be too seperate in distance as the power will drop off for a point source one over radius squared and for a line source of sound at one over radius from the primary tuning fork source. Remember of course sound not being electrical but only a way to see what is being acheived in analogy, in a Tesla Coil the oscillation is about the swing occuring between inductor and capacitor discharge.

Kitten popcorn show is popped and the tasmanian devil skunk/rabbit/humanoid have all discharged all their stored energy. Sleeping will rebuilding their oscillation engines, next kitten spark-lightning show breakdown coming soon!

I’ve always had a slight wonder in my head that I was missing out not having kids, but after two weeks with these high energy kittens, I’m looking forward to getting back to the married with no children or kits lifestyle. I feel for all the guys with kids out there and raising and supporting a family, somebody has to do the a hard shit for us all. Me I’d rather just work on theories, making products, talking to the wife, on here or drinking a cup of tea in peace. The most interesting thing about cats is the more you don’t want to be disturbed the more they impose themselves on you.

In essense I love the little kits as they are a blast and I worry that they won’t get a home given the potential to test positive for disease, but I’m also going to be relieved to see an out for me. I’m hoping for a good ending in two more weeks when the vet re-tests.

My wife calls my comments on here the “Boys Nite Out”, as she says I’m typing as fast as possible, while all she sees is the back of my head. This of course explains all my bad spellings and grammar.

Well it helps that my wife is fairly logical too, its hard to find a woman you can talk engineering with. And 98% of the time she understands everything I say. A smart woman is worth more than 10 rubies and I’ll bet she is actually smarter than me. My brother used to say a good way to scare a chick off was to start talking engineering, science, or math on a date, but for some reason my wife just let me do all the talking and then said the smartest once sentences to summarize about 10 minutes of my talking. Anyway got to get out of the man cave (here). Catch you all later. Back to work on making money on new designs for products.

HR, thanks for the illustration. It gave me more insight. I’d be interested to know how you would determine the optimum distance between two coils and what size coils resonate with each other at any specific potential(voltage). I won’t try to make up for the classes I didn’t take though. Generalities are fine. I also wonder about the medium(air)encompassing the two and how it can be modified to greatest performance. Thanks much for what you sent already. I hope you and yours and the kits all receive a good prognosis from the vet ha ha. I am being slowly turned into an unwilling participant in a kitten free-for-all. They follow me everywhere including bed. Poor CJ sometimes looks at me like he feels he’s being abused when all five think it’s suddenly play time. I had to use the cortisone kitten spray on my foot earlier after one went totally berserk and attacked the most fun thing she could find, my foot. Now I know why it’s called kitten cortisone spray since they don’t need it. Thanks again.

“I’d be interested to know how you would determine the optimum distance between two coils and what size coils resonate with each other at any specific potential(voltage). ”

Well its sure been fun us talking about all this theory of Tesla. I think the key to the design is simply figuring out the secondary resonance frequency so you can tune the primary circuit to match. There is a basic formula for L-C tank circuits comes from differential equations as well as Laplace transforms that say the natural frequency of resonance of an L-C is:

fn=1/sqrt(L*C) so basically as a rough measure you’d need to know the L inductance and C (capacitance) of the secondary circuit to utilize a first pass approximation. I say first pass approximation because it could deviate say with loading from the primary circuitry, as well as tolerance of L-C calculation versus reality. Since of course the textbooks never tell you that there is no ideal inductor. In fact putting a 1 nH inductor on a circuit board near a ground plane will shift the inducatance quite a bit, and most engineers do not even know this BTW. So first pass calculation would be to try to calculate by the winding of the transformer secondary inductance (remember the secondary on the air core tranformer is both an inductor and transformer). Then matching to the L-C circuit on the primary side. Tesla obviously probably had tunable capacitors is my guess on the primary side. Also Tesla didn’t have active solid state transistors as an amplifier but used the air gap spark plug as a Gun Diode effect. In a gun diode you DC bias at an operating point where the diode has a kinked Voltage-versus-I curve. The slope of the curve at any point represents its resistance, because of mobility of different carriers in a doped silicon there is an kink in the curve that gets a negative slope or thus negative resistance. DC biased in this operating range the Gunn diode creates a negative resistor that will cancel out real resistance and turn an L-C circuit to start amplifying noise into an oscillation (oscillator). Well it so turns out that an air gap when it breaks down has this same negative resistance curve and so was the first prinicple of a circuit using a gunb diode topology circuit way before the gunn diode existed. So Tesla would DC bias his spark gap on the primary side near breakdown voltage, creating a negative resistance and amplifying noise on the L-C tank circuit on his primary. That signal was then step up transformed by a coil ratio of secondaryturns divided by primary turns. The idea was that by using an air core and not say iron he could have still step up by the turns ratio and store the energy in the secondary L-C circuit as a swinging-pendulum of L-C energy, doing this over several cycles.

The idea that as I was saying one would want to crudely figure out the range of possible L and C on the primary and try to match on the L and C ration on the secondary is about right. Because again L is an approximation and can change say near groud, two because if using something other than air say iron on the core then the permeability (coupling of magnetic flux) is not constant with amplitude of input current, but can saturate at various loads. Three the L-C on the secondary is not purely just a function of itself, but can be loaded and thus shifted by the L-C on the primary circuit and the turns ratio.

These days most store bought Tesla coils use an auto feedback control unit along with solid state electronics to automatically adjust and create an amplitude oscillation on the primary side. But back in Telsa’s time he would have adjusted the primary L-C after crudely figuring out where they should be nealry matched. The crude basic theory without all the complication is to take Lsecondary*Csecondary=Lprimary*Cprimary. There are much more exact calculation then that taking into the ratio of turns and loading from primary to secondary and vice versa but its all approximate (though a little better) anyway for the other reasons I stated.

People such as yourself that are interested in understanding how this relates to say tapping into earths magnetic dynamo as Tesla studied would first need to understand from his patents how he was planning on building the so called Tesla receiver of his radio stations (prior to Marconi’s invetion) Wardenclyffe Tower. Most people when they think Tesla coil are only studying his patents of how to make the transmitter because high voltage bolts is a thrill, There is the radio receiver end of it too though, and that I believe is where the secret may lie if there is one on how to extract energy from the earth internal as conceived by Tesla. Again this is all speculation for fun, but its my opinion that is what is of more interest and it would have similar features to a Tesla coil as both would require resonance. Even Marcon that shortcut Tesla to the first radio telegraph tranmission borrowed heavily off Telsa patents and L-C circuitry BTW.

On the kittens rough housing the feet, I’ve found tincture iodine works best to heal cat scratches. Take the inflammation down almost instantly. Glad to hear I’m not alone on the kittens. I always found that youtube clip funny on the two engineering guys doing cat science, love the scene where they flash their HP-28 calculators like a geek badge in the beginning. I actually have one of them and used to happily carry them around in my pen pocket. I remember business students called them geek badges. Only if years later I carry no such electronics to see them with their Apples and dumb already done that badges.

Wanted to say that I gave the natural frequency wrong as fn (which is nomenclature for frequency in Hz with units 1/sec), whereas the formula I gave was in (radians/sec). The correct formula for fn=1/(2*Pi*sqrt(L*C)). Also I forgot to once again mention that the output frequency will be skewed by coil turn – coil turn parasitic capacitance, and coil turn to core capacitance (not a problem for air core types). Some of this can be crudely approximated by approximate formula. Or they can be analyzed with a lot of work with an FEA (finite element analysis) program like Ansoft, but as engineers nothing beats just getting a rough approximation and then using reality to fine tune and tweak the end result. Just like in the old days you can model as much as you want but eventually you have to build it anyway and there will be tweaking.

The maximum swing for the output of the secondary will be simply a function of the turns ratio of secondary to primary (irregardless of core permeability coupling) if the source is a low impedance source (all modern Telsa coils probably use low impedance source oscillators). The old signal source for the Tesla coils however used an air gap along with L-C tank circuit and D-C source probably with an inductor choke as its source energy. This means that the source not being a low impedance could also reflect power back from the secondary swing into the primary L-C. I’m speculating and not sure but could model in spice quickly that this might give higher swings on the output of the transfomer than the low impedance oscillators that auto-sweep for frequency match today? Overall as you can see even though one can get crude approximations to within 10% error that doesn’t mean that its an exact science to get a match.

Hot Rod, once again thanks for the explanation. I have wondered if the earth may have different frequency from place to place as compared to an overall frequency emanating from the entire planet. Make sense? Since the surface is greatly varying, it would make some sort of sense that local frequency might vary from an overall planet frequency. Just a thought there. You mentioned rarified air at one time. Would that be a help or hindrance? Seems as though air could inhibit spatial resonance as well as increase it also. I realize to create the same resonance a vacuum would probably be the best way to control that. I don’t know if I have ever heard if a compressed inert gas would be of help since the amount of compression “could” cause a change in temperature(Boyle’s law). I suspect that’s neither here nor there though. So would you seek to stabilize and tune the oscillations with voltage first? And if varying the voltage would get it closer at what point would you try to use either a different material in the coil or change lengths of the coil material to further fine tune it? I realize this is purely speculation but it’s danged interesting. Surely Tesla’s accumulator would be greatly affected by say something like setting it up at altitude on an inert mountain as oppose to being at sea level and close to an active volcano. And yes, I realize you are changing more than one variable at that point too. Anyway, while I don’t understand the fine points of it, it is fascinating. I wanted to post you a link to an article today on Teslan on LRC. This is nothing but just some background but interesting on its own. http://www.lewrockwell.com/2013/07/thorin-klosowski/what-made-nikola-tesla-so-productive/ Thanks for the advice on treating kitten woulds. I realized I probably have no tincture of iodine or mecurachrome and that was always a mainstay before we got too sophisticated to have dye on us or not use the high tech stuff such as hydrocortisone which helped me a great deal. The strong and good stuff was removed from OTC shelves long ago but due to the sheer amounts and types of poison plants we have where I live, we used the stuff like there was no tomorrow when it could be had. It took many years to get all the roots of various poison plants out of the soil near our house and we’d often pay the price in routing it out. I had to chuckle about the HP 28 since in my day we geeks were easily identified at great distance by the slide rule hanging from out belt loops, a couple examples I still have. I haven’t thought about them in a long time. My first computer experience was with punch cards, drive a man to drink they would. Get one(of course there was never getting just one, out of order and everything was worthless and if you submitted them that way you’d get a great deal of flack from the people putting them into the reader and actually operating the computer, a highly skilled job they wouldn’t let very many people perform. Gears, pulleys, tapes, holepunch readers, vacuum tubes, etc. I do have an old HP 12 C though. I suppose if you had access to a computer back then you could have made another simply by monkey see, monkey do. Now that would be something of a challenging project. I was right on the cusp of mixing and matching vacuum tubes and solid state electronics. I actually love that old technology since it was variable to a degree not available with solid state resistors and transistors. Nothing would pull in a station like the old tube type radios. I still have an old tube type CB that walks the walk and talks the talk and to this day is considered a great radio. I bought it used in 1964 so I guess that dates me eh? I bought it from a high school science teacher, mine in fact. I had it in a ’55 Chevy pickup for years hooked to a 108″ whip antenna. You’d better be paying attention when driving under something with fluorescent lights or you’d be buying said bulbs. Good to speak to you, hope you have a great evening. Thanks again.

Eight I did figure it out last night what Tesla was trying to harness. I wrote a big huge theory about it but decided not to publish it on here. Its just too cool actually. Tesla wasn’t BSing actually the inside of the earth is a massive power source actually. It was with your prodding that I came up with the model in my head.

I’d love to share it with you for giving me the inspiration to keep projecting what Tesla’s goal could have been and prodding, but I don’t feel like sharing it with the rest of the world. If you want to know the details then get my email from Eric and I’ll share it to you under the condition that you don’t spill it to everyone else. Besides its a personal theory and at that it could be flawed or wrong.

I think you’d find it really fascinating hypothesis nevertheless, actually what is going on inside the earth and why Tesla figured he could harness it. Turns out that it is a massive induction generator, heat engine in a way most people have never considered. Extraction of its energy is a given with the right method.

Hot Rod, I submitted my request to eric. I hope he has time. I would have published my screw off gmail account but it’s not working. I became fascinated with energy in the Earth after visiting Mexico and seeing their geo-thermal plants there. One is near Tampico and the other I looked at was between Tuxpan and Veracruz. High mountains are only 30-40 minutes west of these locations.

THORIUM energy alternative to Nuclear Power + GOVERNMENT meddling to suppress it!
Yet another government lie that we have lived with–and many have died from.

What is special about thorium?

There is a nuclear technology called thorium that has the ability to provide all the energy that we need for the next 10,000 years in the United States. We built one of these reactors at Oak Ridge in the 1960s, and we proved that it works.

“US physicists in the late 1940s explored thorium fuel for power. It has a higher neutron yield than uranium, a better fission rating, longer fuel cycles, and does not require the extra cost of isotope separation. The plans were shelved because thorium does not produce plutonium for bombs.”

Thorium is as abundant as lead, (it is in COAL!) and produces far less radioactive waste than uranium. But development was shunted aside by the FedGov because it could not be used to exterminate its enemies.

All the impassioned anti-nuclear agitation of the last half century, all the delay and all of the admittedly overstated danger, and all the massive dependence on oil with its potential for conflict in the Middle East, could have been avoided if only the FedGov had not been fixated on weapons of mass destruction. I knew that government had screwed up nukes but I did not know the enormous, wicked extent of the deception.

By weight, thorium can produce 200 times as much energy as uranium, reactors are cheaper to design and waste, much cheaper to store – even if it is stored; for in thorium reactors, the waste can be regenerated for use as fuel. It is also inherently safer, since its fission reaction has to be primed; absent an external neutron stream, it shuts down automatically.

Control rods are not needed, either to regulate energy production or to stop fission in an emergency, because the fission rate is determined by the proton accelerator. If the accelerator stops sending protons, fission stops almost instantly.

Thorium is in coal. Take the thorium out of the coal, use it as a power source, and then turn the coal into synfuel. The Germans perfected this process, and there is actually now a commercial plant running in South Africa by a company called Sasol.

All the impassioned anti-nuclear agitation of the last half century, all the delay and all of the admittedly overstated danger, and all the massive dependence on oil with its potential for conflict in the Middle East, could have been avoided if only the FedGov had not been fixated on weapons of mass destruction. I knew that government had screwed up nukes but I did not know the enormous, wicked extent of the deception.

Excellent point.

FedGov misdirection of technology into the wrong channels, akin to Project X in Atlas Shrugged.

Project X is an invention of the scientists at the state science institute, requiring tons of Rearden Metal. Basically, it is a “death ray”, and is capable of destroying anything with a sonic pulse. The scientists claim that the project will be used to preserve peace and squash rebellion. It is destroyed towards the end of the book, and emits a pulse of radiation that destroys everything in the surrounding area, including Cuffy Meigs and Dr. Stadler, as well as the Taggart Bridge. The invention is publicly introduced as the “Thompson Harmonizer”.

Dennis, just wanted to let you know I appreciate this info. I passed it along to my private forum so we can all be better informed. None of us want to be ignorant of this but have never found anything that helped us be less ignorant. Thanks, B

I agree with the thrust of your comment, but have to quibble about a couple of points.

…heat our homes to 4 times the outdoor temperature on the coldest winter days…

The only meaningful way to talk about a ratio in temperature is relative to absolute zero. In those terms, we’re talking about a ratio of no more more than 1.5.

The Lamborghini Diablo torque spec is said to be about 450 foot-pounds.

You’re comparing foot-pounds of energy with foot-pounds of torque. They are completely different measurements, though their units are the same. To help illustrate the difference, note that any motor or engine can theoretically achieve any number of foot-pounds of torque you desire by gearing it down sufficiently, but it can’t increase its energy output (foot-pounds per second) by doing so.

While electric motors often have HP ratings, I learned to evaluate them using wattage. Most motors are rated with KWH also, the difference between two almost identical motors of varying voltage will depend on the difference in inductance across the coils. Then you get into battery power that introduces another component into the equation of and that’s of efficiency. In dc you get even more factors although I’m no EE and don’t claim such. I do use a watt meter, in inductance meter and typical amp and voltage meters. It gets fairly technical to one specific type of motor when you’re in the field. It wasn’t such a straight forward calculation of power needed when you got into things such as a pump jack with differing motor rpm, sheave sizes, gearbox size and performance factor having to do with loss of energy. I can easily get out of my league here and have done so. ☻

Businesses are so bad at measuring productivity these days (often because the manager never did and doesn’t understand the task of his subordinates) that they can measure only toil and not results. And they can do that only at the office.

The sad part of it is that most middle managers don’t even do that much that’s quasi-productive. IME, most middle and senior managers do … well, hell, I couldn’t tell you what they do, and probably neither could they if they were cornered and forced to describe their “work day” in ten words or less. Those in my company sure the hell don’t provide any “top cover” for those of us who directly interface with clients and need occasional high-level backup when conflicts arise. They sure as hell don’t do any marketing (they’re constantly whining about how those of us “down in the trenches” need to “put the face of the company forward” more than we already do by providing day-to-day service), they sure the hell don’t provide any technical expertise (*smirk* that’ll be a frigid day in hell), and they sure as hell don’t foster team cohesion or offer any sort of vision as to what the company really wants to accomplish in the future.

In short, the only thing I’ve ever observed any of these people doing is exchanging oxygen for carbon dioxide, burning overhead hours doing “administrative work” internal to the firm (but with no obvious beneficial or productive results), and basically just getting in the way of what little productive work manages to get done in spite of their presence.

If I were to try to earn my “living” the way these useless creatures do, I’d be arrested and indicted for fraud and larceny.

IME, most middle and senior managers do … well, hell, I couldn’t tell you what they do, and probably neither could they if they were cornered and forced to describe their “work day” in ten words or less.

Me, I have management added to my work load. Then my bosses have wondered why I can’t do management very well. Because I have to still do work!

What I want THEM to explain to ME one day is why they, with nothing BUT “management” to focus their attention on, can’t even begin to do that, and nothing but THAT with even a minimal margin of competence.

Lib, that’s funny. reminds me of dealings I’ve had with “some” engineers. Engineer to me “you just don’t understand, steel’s not free, you’re overbuilding it” Yes, steel isn’t free and you’re going to be hauling all this off soon. Why he says? Because it has torsional stress you’re not allowing for. What torsional stress? This thing is anchored. Yeah, but what’s inside is not and it’s going to eventually rend this thing apart, bet it won’t last a year. I could have saved my breath and just let him find out in a year or so when it all twisted up and a 30′ screw was ruined as well as all that steel. We ain’t building an airplane here.

Business is interested in selling product. That idea has contaminated all PRODUCTIVE avenues.
We need to use 7Sigma to “lean out” that stupidity. (Not sure that’s even possible, just tossing out jargon. 😉 )

Seriously – it’s not the job of an engineer worthy of the name to find the cheapest way to do something. “Over-engineering” is a fallacy, predicated on the faulty supposition that you shouldn’t deisgn the product to last longer than its weakest part.

If you accept that premise, it makes a lot of sense. But it is inherent / bound to a notion of disposability. There’s a REASON the pyramids still stand: they were “over-engineered.” Same with the old Muscle cars: They lasted because they had staying power: They were Over Engineered. Old appliances, too: dishwasher, vacuum cleaner, etc: all took as essential the notion that they were capital investments, large and expensive. So they had to LAST, had to be rebuilt sometimes.

Now? Something goes wrong, it costs too much to rebuild it – chuck it and buy new, with the billions of dollars you have… Because we’re all rich, dontcha know?

Remember, the human race came from another planet’s genetic waste, dumped here at the end of “Hitchiker’s guide to the Universe.” The more I see – the more I believe that…

“Business is selling a product”. Jean, that was basically what the business I was in did, make and sell a product and you couldn’t sell what you couldn’t make and all it takes is one component to shut the entire plant down. I used to marvel at all the 50 year old equipment that was still running fine. Was it tied to a computer? No, but it made product as well as the new stuff, often better and lasted many times longer. I loved those old electric motors 6 feet in diameter, open to the wind, and that was a good thing. I finally saw one of them that needed to be replaced but nothing matched it’s power and size so it was sent to the motor shop and rebuilt. It was a thing of beauty, I’d have been proud to have my name on the design. I’d walk by open motor control boxes with big fans blowing into them. Wouldn’t it have been better to use bigger wire and put them in some place away from the heat source? Sure it would but it would have cost quite literally, a few dollars more….more than replacing heaters, breakers, fuses, disconnects, not on your life? plus all the time wasted trying to keep a bad thing going. When I built my cattle working pens I kept in mind all the disappearing head I’d seen go over countless pens or through them. I built mine with the bottom of the top rail 6.5′ above the ground and offset to the vertical of the other rails. I built the gates with sheet steel on both sides and close enough to the slab so a hoof couldn’t get caught under it or in it and never had an injury from the pens themselves, something I don’t know anyone else can say. Everybody gave me grief over the height of my pens except my neighbor who had 6′ tall sides and we’d watched one of my crazy heifers go over. He came down and said, I wish I’d built my top rail higher. The very first time we worked cattle, a crazy ass 900# heifer almost made the leap but that last 8.5″ was too much and she had no place to get a hoof in since the sides weren’t straight down from the rail. When she fell back and went “whoof”, I grinned. I’d been kidded about building pens for working ostriches. Well, cattle and ostriches were both contained and there was no drama, just getting the job done. When I see something like that, I think “good design”. The old hands have watched too many rear-ends going into the brush.

I wish gas would be taxed to $10 per gallon in order to get the “little people” off the roads 🙂

Just kidding…But does anyone else notice that it is mostly the stupid little brats with near zero marketable skills demanding higher gas taxes from their Owners? Now if that isn’t “stupidest people on Earth” award….err…Darwin Award.

The CEO of Gulf just said he expects a barrel of oil to be $50 by year end. He would not say this without his government master’s permission. Maybe the scum in DC is trying to con their tax livestock to get out and spend their counterfeit “money”. Maybe China and Europe will fully collapse and he’s right.

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Eric started out writing about cars for mainstream media outlets such as The Washington Times, Detroit News and Free Press, Investors Business Daily, The American Spectator, National Review, The Chicago Tribune and Wall Street Journal.